The purpose of propagation is to model how important characteristics like phasing, voltage, and pressure behave within a network (circuit, pressure zone, etc). The goal is to provide basic modeling and validation capabilities within the GIS for these characteristics to ensure the GIS is properly modeling these systems. The benefit of this is that when the data in the GIS is invalid the utility network can immediately identify the problem so a mapper can correct it before the edits are approved and committed to the system where they can impact the decision-making ability of operators, engineers, or other stakeholders of the GIS.
Does this make the utility network an engineering analysis tool? No. But when properly configured the model is good enough that engineering and operations can extract the data from the GIS and trust that it contains all the information to produce a valid model without any manual data correction in the modeling tool.
