topic Re: Electric backbone or mainline - Network Attribute, Category, or Tier? in ArcGIS Utility Network Questions

Electric backbone or mainline - Network Attribute, Category, or Tier?

GISP00 — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 20:58:14 GMT

In a electric distribution model how would it be configured to trace only on the "backbone" or sometimes referred to as "mainline" This could be defined as the 3 phase conductor bounded by specific fuses or switches. A current geometric network model may have attributes "backbone indicator", "backbone end", and "backbone pass thru"

To perform a trace on the backbone in the Utility Network, would that be reliant upon Network Attributes, Category, or a Tier?

Second question, is it possible to use propagation on conductors from circuit breaker up to the barriers of fuse and switches so that the attribute "backbone" is automatically applied?

Re: Electric backbone or mainline - Network Attribute, Category, or Tier?

JohnAlsup — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 12:29:44 GMT

The first option is to trace for only three phase equipment. This can be done by adding a Filter Barrier in the trace to make anything that does not contain all three phases a barrier.

The second option is to add a network attribute, (don't try to make it inline) that indicates an object or feature is Mainline. Then you could modify your trace to add a traversability barrier that does not include this network attribute being true. But, this will require disabling the network topology to make that change.

Re: Electric backbone or mainline - Network Attribute, Category, or Tier?

RobertKrisher — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 22:01:57 GMT

If you did want to use network categories that would save you having to create and assign a network attribute to your different classes, but I would only recommend that approach if you could clearly define backbone from your taplines using the asset types (which may not be the case).

If you could cleanly define this using asset types than you would add a condition barrier to stop when it finds a feature where the network category does not equal Backbone:

This will allow the trace to traverse features that have that network category assigned, and it will stop when it encounters a feature that doesn't have that network category assigned.

Re: Electric backbone or mainline - Network Attribute, Category, or Tier?

GISP00 — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 00:36:56 GMT

Thank you. I will test the recommendations and update with results here.

Re: Electric backbone or mainline - Network Attribute, Category, or Tier?

GISP00 — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 00:38:20 GMT

I am impressed that two of the Esri UN experts replied. Thank you. I will try each recommendation and provide results here.

Re: Electric backbone or mainline - Network Attribute, Category, or Tier?

RobertKrisher — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 16:34:25 GMT

It's going to come down to whether you can determine what is/isn't backbone based on the type of feature (i.e., asset type) or whether you need to do it on a per-feature basis. If it's on a per-feature basis, or you want something more nuanced than backbone/not backbone, you'll need a network attribute.