Utility Network: Emergency Valves

MarkCederholm

Why are bi-directional dual terminals assigned to emergency valves in the Gas asset package?  That creates connectivity errors on data loading, and a big pain in the butt assigning the connections, when it doesn't really matter which is connected to what.

RobertKrisher

My guess is that this was done to support creating isolation zones. With a little bit of geoprocessing you should be able to automatically calculate terminal assignments for each of your devices (if you're going to be at GeoConX I can walk you through the process I've developed for this).

But why do we need to have terminals to support isolation zones?  Because isolation zones are subnetworks, subnetworks are defined by one or more subnetwork controllers (emergency shutdown valves), and each subnetwork controller has to specify which of its terminals is associated with the subnetwork.  But why?  Because each side of the valve is going to be a different isolation zone and we need a way to identify which zone is associated with each side of the valve.