Latest Contributions by TomDeWitte

Gas Outage Management Part 3 of 3 The Gas Relight Process By Tom Coolidge and Tom DeWitte Natural gas distribution utilities have a proven track record of high reliability, even during extreme weather events.  But, in addition to smaller gas outages, exceptions resulting in large gas outages do infrequently occur.  These exceptions continue because of such things as planned pipe replacements, unplanned errors during routine maintenance activities, and transmission pipeline supply issues.  As examples, just in the last year or so: 2,800 customers in Dallas, TX experienced a large gas outage, 7,600 customers in Merrimack Valley, MA were out for some time, 2,200 customers in Dayton, OH experienced a large gas outage, and 4,900 customers in Ashland, WA experienced a large gas outage. A Better Way While these large gas outages are generally like those of earlier years, the expectation of how a gas relight event is best handled has been changing. I experienced this first hand in 2018.  During that gas outage event, I saw state and local elected officials arrive at the gas utility every morning for an in-person update.  Later in the day, they expected to be provided with a video update on the progress of gas service restoration.  Not only did the elected officials expect to be given an up-to-date summary of the overall outage event, they also had questions and expected answers to the status of individual customers. These same elected officials expected that their local gas utility be able to inform them on demand on the status of any customer. Further, they expected that any customer could contact their local gas utility and receive the same information. Most current gas relight processes in use in the gas industry are not capable of meeting these expectations.  They lack the real-time communication capability between multiple gas field staff and they lack the real-time communication capability to inform office staff, executives, and local communities seamlessly with this same information. ArcGIS software leverages today’s telecommunication system to enable the gas relight information to be collected and shared in near real-time. The key to a successful gas outage solution based on the ArcGIS software is in knowing how. In this blog, we will answer the question of how to enable gas field staff to collect and share an individual customer’s gas relight status in near real-time and how office executives can monitor and share the event status in near real-time. In the first blog of this series, we described how the ArcGIS desktop software can be used to perform a gas isolation trace which will accurately identify the customer meters impacted, the isolating devices or pinch locations and the extent of the outage.  In the second blog, we addressed how the ArcGIS platform can be leveraged to transmit this large amount of information from the office to the correctly assigned gas field staff. In this blog, the third of the series, we will walk through a hypothetical gas relight event and see how this information is streamed between office to field and field to field. Gas Relight Initiated When the gas relight list of impacted customer meters is uploaded and assigned to the gas field staff, the office staff and executives have immediate visibility into the event.  The office dashboard shown below shows an example of a gas relight dashboard at the initiation of the gas relight event.  At this point, all 15 impacted customer meters can be individually seen on the map, and their status is communicated by symbol color (red = out, orange = off, green = relit, and purple = no entry). In the field, the gas field staff can see the same near real-time information on their mobile devices (smart phone, tablet, laptop). This is the first view of the outage event provides a view of the entire event.  Every gas field technician can see the status of every impacted customer meter impacted. The second view is a presentation of those impacted customer meters assigned to the field technician. Together, these two views provide gas field technicians with a complete understanding of the gas relight event. Gas Relight Meter Turn-off As the gas field staff begins the process of turning off the individual impacted customer meters, everyone in the field and the office will see the meter status change. Having the status of a meter seamlessly communicated to everyone in the field and the office allows for improvements to the gas relight process itself. Gas field technicians no longer need to stop working the outage to deliver their documentation to a gas operations supervisor.  If a gas field technician finishes his or her assigned meters, he or she can see the real-time status of the other gas field technicians.  This means that a technician who has just completed the left side of the street, can simply walk across the street to start working those meters which have not yet been done by the technician working on the right side of the street. Gas Relight Meter Turn-On The turn-on process is a multi-step process that includes turning the valve at the meter to open the customer to the flow of natural gas.  It also includes going into the customer building to relight the gas appliances.  If the customer is not available to provide access to the appliances within the building, the customer is marked as “no access”. If all turn-on tasks can be completed, then the customer’s meter status is changed to “relit”. Remember the office is seeing the status change as soon as the field technician updates the meter and submits the record change. Gas executives and customer representatives can see the status of a meter within seconds, as quickly as the telecommunication system makes possible.  This allows customer service representatives to confidently inform customers when they call asking for information.  It also allows gas executives to easily communicate to an elected official the status of the overall event and any individual meter. Conclusion Today’s ArcGIS presents gas utilities with the opportunity to greatly improve on how they execute the gas outage restoration process.  Modern gas service restoration at its best is an enterprise-wide activity with workers in the field and office working together collaboratively in real-time on the same data. This blog, and the two that preceded it, together described how the core capabilities of the ArcGIS platform enable a gas utility to implement a modern gas service restoration process.  This process is accurate, efficient, and timely.  It is a process that will provide customer service representatives, gas operations supervisors, and gas management with real-time clarity on the progress of each customer through the gas service restoration process. ... View more

Communicating identified customers to Field Gas Operations By Tom Coolidge and Tom DeWitte There’s no authoritative record of the date of the first sizable gas outage in the United States, but a candidate for that distinction is June 14, 1837.  If the Gas Light Company of Baltimore had a control room then, the first alarm likely would have sounded shortly after 9 p.m. The Baltimore Sun reports it was around then that a second powerful thunderstorm dumped an enormous amount of rain in a short period, leaving the Jones’ Falls stream “incapable of retaining its boundaries.”  The resulting flooding caused loss of life, loss of houses, and vast destruction of other property– including partial inundation of the Gas House sufficient to prevent the manufacture of gas for days.  Restoring service was a formidable challenge. When this first outage occurred how do you think the staff of the Gas Light Company of Baltimore determined which customers were impacted by the outage. Did they simply test each gas lamp to see it lit or not?  Once they figured out the extent of the outage in the field, how was that information shared back to the office?  Most likely someone got on horseback or climbed into a horse-drawn buggy and rode the information from the field to the office. If the office had additional feedback for the field on how to isolate the outage and restore service, that information would have also been delivered back to the location of the outage on horseback.  How much longer was the duration of the outage extended while the gas utility staff waited for the information to be delivered? Innovation and communication The speed of communication has always been a limitation on the speed with which gas outages can be resolved. For over 100 years from the creation of that first pipe system in Baltimore, the speed of information was limited to the speed a person could be transported from one place to another.  Innovation in the second half of the 19 th century enabled small amounts of information to be transmitted between staff in the office and the field by telegraph and the telephone. Further enhancements in the early 21 st century have enabled large amounts of information to be transmitted between the office and the field staff. These technologies broke the limitation of the speed of information being constrained by the speed of humans. A Better Way Today’s telecommunication system provides the capability to communicate large amounts of information, such as a list of impacted customer meters, between the office and the field in near real time.  The ArcGIS software leverages today’s telecommunication system to transmit that list of impacted customer meters. The key to a successful gas outage solution based on ArcGIS is in knowing how. In this blog, we will answer the question of how to get the list of impacted customer meters from the office, and to the assigned field staff. In the first blog of this series, we described how the ArcGIS desktop software can be used to perform a gas isolation trace which will identify the customer meters impacted, the isolating devices or pinch locations and the extent of the outage.  In this blog, we will address the next major step which is to get this large amount of information from the office to the correctly assigned gas field staff. Prepping Data for the Field The first step in accomplishing this is to use a geoprocessing model to upload the selected data and append it to existing feature layers. These feature layers can be hosted in ArcGIS Online, or they can be hosted on an ArcGIS Enterprise Portal. In addition to appending the customer meters impacted, the isolating devices, pinch locations, and the extent area, a geoprocessing model provides the opportunity to prepare the data for field use.  Here is a list of commonly added attributes and their purpose: TRACEID to customer meters point features, pinch location point features, isolating valves point features, and extent area polygons. This will allow all data associated with the outage event to have a common ID. RELIGHTSTATUS to the customer meters point features. This will allow gas field staff to track each meter/customer point feature through their gas light cycle (unassigned, assigned, out, off, relit, no entry,). Default value is “unassigned”. TIMEOUT to the customer meters point features. This will allow gas field staff to document the date and time when the meter lost service. TIMEOFF to the customer meters point features. This will allow gas field staff to document the date and time when the meter was turned off. TIMERELIT to the customer meters point features. This will allow gas field staff to document the date and time when the meter was turned back on. NUMBEROFPASSES to the customer meters point features. This will allow gas field staff to document the number of attempts to gain access to the premise to relight the gas appliances. OUTAGETYPE to the outage event area polygon features. This will allow office staff to identify the type of event which caused the gas outage.   The geoprocessing model when run will take impacted customer meters and upload them to the feature layers.  A minute or two after the model has finished running, the data is available for gas operations staff. No more waiting for the horse-drawn buggy to arrive with the information. Assigning Impacted Meters/Customers The last step is to assign the impacted customer meters to individual gas operations field staff.  To perform this step, we will use Workforce for ArcGIS. Workforce is comprised of two applications; a dispatcher web application and a smart device mobile application.  The Worforce web application provides the ability to view the newly uploaded list of impacted customer meters.  Because the individual records can be viewed on a map, it is very easy to use geography to assign them to field staff.  For example, in the screen shot below the customer meters on the west side of the street can easily be selected and assigned to a single gas field technician.  This will improve the efficiency of the gas relight process by clustering the assigned meters. When the Workforce Dispatcher web application assigns impacted customer meters, the field staff are immediately notified.  The mobile app will show the gas field technicians their assigned customer meters.  No more waiting for information. In the third and final blog of this blog series, the issue of working the gas relight process will be addressed. Conclusion ArcGIS today is deployed worldwide at many gas organizations, providing the ability to replace and improve upon non-spatial legacy processes.  Identifying impacted customers, whether they are connected by steel pipe or pinchable plastic pipe, can be accomplished in just a few minutes.  Using ArcGIS tools enables information to be prepared, transmitted, assigned, and viewed by field staff in a matter of minutes. No more waiting for the horse-drawn carriage, telegraph message, or telephone message to arrive with the information.   PLEASE NOTE: The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent Esri’s position, strategies, or opinions. ... View more

Getting Started By Identifying Customers Impacted By Tom Coolidge and Tom DeWitte   News of a gas outage can arrive from various sources.  It can come from a sensor indicating an abnormal condition.  Maybe it comes from a customer calling into customer service.  Or, a contractor calling operations after an excavation mishap.  Another possibility is a citizen calling in to report gas odor at a location.  Regardless of the source of the outage news, confirmation of an outage triggers one of a gas utility’s priority processes – restoring safe and reliable service to customers. As important and critical a task as gas outage management is to a gas organization and to the community it supports, this process has changed little over the last 100 years.  For many gas organizations, it can take several hours to identify which customers have been impacted.  Once the customers are identified, getting the list of impacted customers to the field gas operations staff is still primarily a paper process. Someone literally must get into a vehicle and drive the list of customers to the location of the gas outage event.  As the field gas operations staff begins the gas relight process, they too still tend to use paper to document the status of each customer.  This means that management will always have a delayed understanding of the progress of restoring gas service.  When the mayor or governor calls asking for an update, gas executives are often get caught with little current information to pass on. There has got to be a better way.   And, there is.  In fact, most of the gas industry already possesses the software to resolve these issues and significantly improve a gas organization’s response to a gas outage event.  The software I am referring to is the ArcGIS software currently widely used by gas organizations around the world.  This blog is the first in a series of three blogs explaining how the standard capabilities of the ArcGIS software can be deployed to address these common gas outage management challenges.  All functionality described in these blog articles are standard capabilities available today.  No customization or coding is needed.  This first blog addresses the issue of identifying the customers impacted by a gas outage event.  This task often takes several hours when it needs to be accomplished in minutes. Additionally, the historical processes have had problems with accurately identifying the impacted customers and communicating precisely where those customer meters are located.  The second blog will address the issue of communicating the list of impacted customers to the gas operations field staff.  The typical paper process takes too much time, causing delayed field operations and lower customer satisfaction.  The third blog will address the gas relight process.  This process is also typically performed with paper.  The use of paper to track and communicate progress adds difficulty and inefficiency to this process.  The use of paper not only engrains a delay in relaying the update status to gas management and other interested parties, it also inputs a delay in relaying the status of individual meters between deployed field staff. Identifying Impacted Customers Current methods used by many gas organizations are lacking in accuracy and timeliness when identifying the customers impacted by a planned or unplanned gas outage.  One common method is to use the Customer Information System (CIS) for identifying impacted customers.  Since a CIS typically lacks an understanding of the connectivity of the pipe system, it is forced to rely on street address ranges.  The use of address ranges is inaccurate.  At every street intersection are four corner parcel lots.  Whether they are included in the address range is dependent on what street the house is listed under. This inaccuracy often requires a time-consuming manual process of having someone review the list, identify all crossing streets within the address ranges, determine the address ranges of those crossing streets, identify the corner lot addresses, then determine for each corner lot, whether it gets its gas from the impacted line, or from the gas line running down the cross street.   Another common method is to use flow analysis systems to perform an isolation trace to identify the impacted customers.  This process is quicker, but it too is imprecise. The imprecision is due to the flow analysis software’s requirement to cluster groups of customers onto the gas pipe system at a singular location even though they each have individual service lines connecting to the gas main at discrete locations. In today’s gas pipe systems, the majority of gas mains are constructed of pinchable polyethylene plastic pipe. A gas event can be isolated or pinched at nearly any point along the plastic gas main.  The clustering of customer locations along the pipe system creates an inherent conflict between where gas operations places a clamp to pinch the pipe, and where the flow modeling engineer chose to aggregate the cluster of customers. This conflict creates an inaccuracy in the identification of impacted customers. Accurately and quickly identifying impacted customers The solution to addressing this problem is to use a system that understands the connectivity of the entire pipe system from its source, such as a town border station, to its end destination at the customer meter. ArcGIS provides the ability to maintain a connected representation of the entire pipe system, and the ability to perform a gas isolation trace to identify the meter or meter sets impacted by a gas outage. To perform this trace, you will require the following software: ArcGIS 10.2.1 or higher, with a geometric network or ArcGIS Pro 2.3 or higher, ArcGIS Enterprise 10.7 or higher with a utility network   Additionally, your ArcGIS representation of the gas pipe system will need to model the following gas system assets: mains services isolation valves regulator stations (if regulator station valves are not individually mapped) town border stations (if town border station valves are not individually mapped) meters or meter sets NOTE: If using meter sets you will need a link to a table identifying all meters contained within the meter set. This table is often an extraction of information from the Customer Information System   Your mains and services will at a minimum need to include the material of the pipe, so pinchable pipe can be differentiated from non-pinchable pipe. The Gas Isolation Trace The gas isolation trace is a more complex trace algorithm than simply identifying those pipes connected to the location of the pipe system failure, which are also between isolating valves.  With most gas pipe systems, the network is deliberately looped, to provide multiple sources of gas to any given location in the pipe system.  If this were true for every location on the pipe system, a simple connected trace defined to stop at barriers such as isolating valves or pinch points would be all that is needed.  But, there are portions of most gas systems where locations have only one source of gas.  Think of a gas pipe running along a dead-end street or a cul-de-sac. If there is an isolating valve or pinch point at the location where the single feed pipe subsystem integrates with the larger looped pipe system, then the simple connected trace would ignore the customers on the downstream side of the barrier.  A more intelligent trace algorithm is required.  This more intelligent trace algorithm is generally referred to as the gas isolation trace.  A gas isolation trace is a multi-trace trace.  This means that the isolation trace runs a series of traces.  The first trace is the connected trace to identify the barriers (isolating valves and specified pinch locations).  Then a second round of traces is performed for each selected barrier.  This second round of traces is checking to verify that there is a source of gas feeding the barrier from the opposing side of the barrier.  This is to identify those dead-ends which do not have access to another source of gas.  Those customers downstream of the barrier on the dead-end need to be included in the list of customers impacted by the outage. Gas Isolation Trace tools The ArcGIS gas user community is fortunate in that there are multiple options for tools which can perform this industry specific type of trace. One option is to download the free Gas utility editing tools provided by Esri. This ArcMap Add-In is available from the following Esri web site: http://solutions.arcgis.com/utilities/gas/help/as-built-editing/ Another option is to leverage ArcMap Add-In tools from one of our business partners, such as Schneider Electric or Magnolia River. For the ArcGIS Pro environment leveraging the utility network, this trace is a base capability as of the ArcGIS 10.7 release. Identifying Impacted Customers Operating the gas isolation trace tool is not complicated.  Simply identify the estimated location of the pipe system failure on the map.  In GIS speak this is called placing the flag to identify the start location of the trace. When the isolation trace is run it will select all customers within the impacted area.  In my screen shot below you can see that this initial run selects over 100 impacted customers.   Identifying the location of pinch points The prevalence of pinchable polyethylene plastic pipe enables the additional capability to reduce the number of impacted customers, by applying a gas clamp to pinch the pipe and stop the flow of gas to the location of the pipe system failure.  To represent this field capability in the GIS system, place a barrier at the location being considered for the pipe clamp.   With the proposed location(s) of the pipe clamp(s) now identified, the isolation trace is run a second time.  This time the resultant list of impacted customers has been reduced to less than 20. The person running the analysis for both traces has so far only invested a few minutes of their time.  In that short time an accurate list of impacted customers has been created.   Defining the extent of the gas outage event In today’s always connected, smartphone world, gas executives and managers expect to be able to access critical information that is easy to understand.  They generally do not need to see the list of individual customers impacted, often all they want to know is “where is the outage”, and “how many customers are impacted.” By identifying the list of impacted customers with the ArcGIS tools, it is very easy to run an additional step to generate a polygon to define the boundary of the event.  In the GIS, a tool such as the Minimum Boundary Geometry geoprocessing tool will perform this task. The creation of an event area feature provides a clear visual understanding of where this outage is occurring.  Having this singular feature representation also provides an intuitive means for managing event summary information, such as duration, and count of impacted customers.  The Esri-provided gas isolation tools automatically generate this polygon as part of the operation of the isolation trace.  In addition to the automatic generation of the polygon, a of every meter is generated and assigned an event ID to automatically relate the impacted customers to this specific event. With the list of impacted customers defined and created, as well as the event bounding polygon, this information is ready to be electronically shared to gas operations field staff. In the next blog, the 2 nd blog of this blog series, the issue of delivering this list of impacted customers will be addressed. Conclusion ArcGIS today is deployed worldwide at many gas organizations, providing the ability to replace and improve upon non-spatial legacy processes.  Identifying impacted customers, whether they are connected by steel pipe or pinchable plastic pipe, can be accomplished in just a few minutes.  Using the ArcGIS tools can provide a more accurate list of impacted customers than is available via legacy methods.  This list not only identifies who has been impacted, it also clearly and accurately identifies where those impacted customers are located.    PLEASE NOTE: The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent Esri’s position, strategies, or opinions. ... View more

Similarities and Dissimilarities Among Electric and Gas Outages By Tom Coolidge and Tom DeWitte   After a storm with strong winds and rain heavy enough to cause flooding, one neighbor away at the time may ask another still there if there are any outages in the neighborhood.  It’s understandable if the first response back is about whether the area’s electricity is still on or not.  That’s because outage is a term more commonly associated with electricity than natural gas, for good reason.  Electric outages are much more common.  A survey by the American Gas Association, reported by the Natural Gas Council, revealed in one recent year that Americans experienced 8.1 million power outages and fewer than 100,000 natural gas outages! One obvious reason for that sizeable difference is that electric distribution networks predominantly are above ground, while gas pipe networks predominantly are underground, free from most hazards on and above the surface.  That difference makes it rare for an event to be severe enough to impact the ability of a natural gas distribution network to safely deliver gas to customers.  But events of a magnitude sufficient to cause many customer outages at one time do occur.  For instance, entire areas of a gas utility service territory can be affected by flooding from a hurricane or pipe breaks from an earthquake.  And, likewise, they can be affected by pipe dig-ins at a critical location during construction activities or failure of pipe metal due to corrosion or other cause. Beyond temporary inconvenience, gas outages caused by pipe damage releasing natural gas may be dangerous.  The release of natural gas represents an imminent threat to people and property.  That makes resolving this threat as rapidly as possible critical.  A gas outage not only presents a threat to the safety of people and the preservation of property, it also presents a negative impact to the local economy.  Restaurants that rely on gas to heat their grills and ovens, cannot operate. Hotels are unable offer their rooms when they are unable to heat their rooms or provide hot water for bathing.  Manufacturers which rely on natural gas to run their operations must close and send their workers home. There is another significant difference between electric and gas service.  Restoring gas service is more difficult than restoring electric service.  That is because electric distribution systems are designed to be shut down under abnormal conditions and natural gas pipe networks aren’t.  Restoring natural gas service following an event that causes many outages is a multi-step process involving multiple parties, many workers, and lots of time and effort.  For this blog, I will combine the many steps into three groups.  These groups are: identification of impacted customers, assignment and transmittal of impacted customers to field staff, restoring gas service to customers. These three primary steps are the same steps followed back in the horse and buggy days when gas distribution systems were initially implemented.  Back then the best technology for enabling this process was paper.  Building a gas outage process on paper is problematic.  The process of identifying impacted customers is inaccurate and time consuming.  It takes some gas organizations hours to generate the list of customers impacted by a gas outage.  Having humans manually review lists of customer addresses to determine who is connected to the impacted portion of the pipe system is time consuming and inaccurate. No customer on a cold January day wants to be told that the gas utility is still reviewing customer lists to determine who is impacted.  Using paper in the field to track the relight process for restoring gas service is inefficient.  Field staff and office management are both blind to the progress of restoration until someone stops working and manually shares their information.  These problems are not new, they have been around since the first gas distribution pipe systems were constructed in the early 1800s. Technology has changed dramatically since the early 1800s.  Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in the 1870s, greatly improving the speed of communication.  John Atanasoff, while teaching at Iowa State University in the 1930s, created the first electronic digital computer, setting the stage for advanced data storage and analytics.  Frank Canova of IBM created the first smartphone in the early 1990s.  Steve Jobs, of Apple, Inc, would later improve upon the idea of mobile communication and computing with the IPhone.  Jack Dangermond, the founder of Esri, Inc., created ArcGIS providing the means to leverage these major technology advances with geography.  Geography is core to understanding the connectivity of a pipe system and where along the pipe system impacted customers of a gas outage are located.   With all these amazing advances in communication, digital computing, mobile computers, and Geographical Information Systems (GIS), why are some gas utilities still using a predominantly paper-based solution to gas outage? There may well be multiple reasons for that, but those possible reasons no longer include the unavailability of GIS capable of supporting a totally computer-based approach to supporting the gas outage restoration process. Today’s ArcGIS presents gas utilities with the opportunity to greatly improve on how they execute the gas outage restoration process.  Modern gas service restoration at its best is an enterprise-wide activity with workers in the field and office working together collaboratively in real-time on one source of the truth. Next week we will release the first in a series of three blogs on modern gas service restoration. This first blog addresses the issue of identifying the customers impacted by a gas outage event.  This task often takes several hours when it needs to be accomplished in minutes. Additionally, the historical processes have had problems with accurately identifying the impacted customers and communicating precisely where those customer meters are located.  The second blog will address the issue of communicating the list of impacted customers to the gas operations field staff.  The typical paper process takes too much time, causing delayed field operations and lower customer satisfaction.  The third blog will address the gas relight process.  This process is also typically performed with paper.  The use of paper to track and communicate progress adds difficulty and inefficiency to this process.  The use of paper not only engrains a delay in relaying the update status to gas management and other interested parties, it also inputs a delay in relaying the status of individual meters between deployed field staff. These three blogs together will describe how the core capabilities of the ArcGIS platform, enables a gas utility to implement a modern gas service restoration process.  A process that is accurate, efficient and timely.  A process that will provide customer service reps, gas operations supervisors, and gas management with the real-time clarity on the progress of each customer thru the gas service restoration. Dramatic enhancements in communication and computation have occurred since the first gas distribution systems were built in the early 1800’s. Industry pioneers such as Bell, Atanasoff, Canova, and Dangermond have given the world incredible enhancements.  Isn’t it time these enhancements were put to use? PLEASE NOTE: The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent Esri’s position, strategies, or opinions. ... View more