Fault Locations via Drive Time Model

[HETAYLORsanteecoopercomTaylor]

I have seen several demo's from ESRI where they show a street network and either EMS vehicles or police. The user clicks on a vehicle and types in a time value in a dialog and it will show a polygon of how far that vehicle can cover based on the road network (factors in speed limits of road) etc. This way you can see the coverage and how far out a vehicle is etc.

I was thinking...instead of a road network what if it was a transmission line network. Instead of a vehicle what if the user clicks a substation location. Then when the relay group tells us there is a fault from Substation XYZ and it is 4 miles from said sub it will show us all the locations that are 4 miles away on any circuit coming out of that substation. 

Yes we can measure it and do that now....but when you have a line with taps and taps with taps...it would be nice for GIS to show us all the locations that meet that criterion. Just wondering if the drive time widget could be adjusted and used for this purpose.

NOTE: we do NOT have a geometric network nor are we using Utility Network. 

[HETAYLORsanteecoopercomTaylor]

forgot to add...anyone doing anything like this? if so, what is your method?

[JeffreyGrussing-GRE · Accepted solution]

Yes we have a duplicate layer in our system that has linear referencing built into it. each circuit has a from and to measured route. we have built a custom widget and server object extension that takes the relay data from the EMS historian and traces out the given distance the relay predicts and draws and line and places a point at the probable location of the fault. by using the measured route, you can get the distance to location no matter how many branches. it's like driving direction in reverse.

[Clayton-Cooley]

This is something I've been mulling over the past few days. Would you have time to discuss how you're doing this? We have a tool that will provide a fault trace location based on the distance from the sub, but the branches complicate things and we often get inaccurate results. 

[JeffreyGrussing-GRE]

I would be happy to talk to you about how we are doing this. It is based on measured routes. AKA linear referencing. and we built a server object extension SOE to perform the trace. we also have an ELT that captures the data from our EMS historian. that is all wrapped up in a custom widget in a web app. you can send me an email and we can get together to discuss jgrussing@grenergy.com

[JeffreyGrussing-GRE]

thats ETL no ELT