Infosys-Oracle Blog : Oracle Business Intelligence for Utilities: Making Great Use of Outage, Restoration, and Energy Distribution Information

The Oracle Utilities roadmap for Business Intelligence (BI) has become clearer and headed in a direction of strength. Going forward Oracle Business Intelligence for Utilities (OBIU) replaces the unpopular Oracle Utilities Business Intelligence (OUBI). Don't let the similar names confuse you. They are two separate products. Unlike its predecessor, the OBIU is built on OBIEE framework (Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition). With OBIU, Utilities will have fewer challenges with the installation and implementation of the Business Intelligence Framework, Portals, and Dashboards. With the ongoing implementation of smart meters and smart grid projects, more and more data will become available to a utility. Smart Grid data stored in the BI can be used to plan power distribution and influence consumption and decrease having to purchase power from other utilities at more expensive rates. An effective Business Intelligence solution is needed to mine the data and display it in useful reports and dashboards, which enable Utility executives to improve their decision making abilities by having near real time and historical information related to demand, usage, trends, and outage risks, and asset usage.

Using Near Real Time (NRT) data and dashboards (instead of directly querying the OMS database) keeps the Outage Management System operating at high performance levels and enables key stakeholders (like the media and executives)to have access to critical and current information. While is not at real time, it is extracted at regular frequencies measured in minutes. Executives and supervisory personnel are able to see and make use of system wide summaries of outage statuses and detailed customer information. With near real time monitoring, an eye can be kept on critical distribution operation processes, restoration progress and projected restorations to come throughout major events, like restoring after a hurricane. It will help Utilities to make support decisions like whether to request support in the form of mutual aid crews from a nearby utility so that large outage events can be restored as quickly as possible. Reports during storms are possible that use near real time and historical data combined to calculate estimations for restoration times of major events like blizzards or earthquakes.

Every utility keeps its eye on certain restoration metrics, like Customer Average Interruption Duration Index (CAIDI) or Service Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI), Customer Average Interruption Frequency Index (CAIFI). Data kept in the BI database is capable of reporting this and much more. Reports are possible to keep awareness of the most troubled spots in the network, and enable proactive action to prevent many outages from ever occurring. By identifying the problem spots, investigation of root causes is easier, which results in fixing not only the symptom (the outage) but also the problem (root cause). For example, if the utility knows that certain areas are more prone to squirrels or certain birds causing high numbers of outages, the appropriate preventative action can be made. Another question the utility's engineers can see from the data is if and when certain circuits tend to get overloaded. Planned switching can be performed to avoid future overloads. These are only a few examples of the benefits which Business Intelligence can provide to Utilities.

Have you begun working with the Oracle Business Intelligence for Utilities? What reports and dashboards bring the greatest value to your region of the country? I'd love to hear the comments on this post and the BI success stories.