GIS/OMS Interface for Hydro One Networks

Hydro One Networks (Hydro One) is a transmission and largely rural distribution utility in Ontario, Canada.  They manage 1.2 million customers supplied by their distribution network with an Outage Management System named "Outage Response Management System" (ORMS).

Hydro One was maintaining the electrical model within ORMS by using an outsourced Geographic Information System (GIS).  They wanted to move away from this GIS to their enterprise GIS based on ArcGIS and ArcFM software.  This allows them to maintain the data in house, provide more timely data updates, and share the connectivity data with other groups within Hydro One.  Once the data is in the Enterprise GIS, an interface to ORMS is needed to import the circuits.

The Role of ExtenSys

ExtenSys was invited to participate in the DMS replacement project. As part of the team, several ExtenSys members offered project management support and participated in the hardware and software implementation. Specifically, members of ExtenSys participated in:

• Determine where the various software interfaces exist in Hydro One’s infrastructure
• Enhance the GIS schema based on the existing GIS schemas to form the basis of an enterprise data model
• Migrate data into the Enterprise GIS
• Acquire data maintenance tools and ensure staff are trained on the tools
• Acquire software to extract electrical and landbase data from the GIS into a format suitable for ORMS
• Configure the import tool used to bring data into ORMS
• Testing the quality of the data migration
• Testing the functional and structural aspects of the extract and import tools
• Deployment
• Project Management
• Interaction with other Hydro One stakeholders

ExtenSys provided subject matter expertise on the Outage Management – GIS interface as well as project management services, requirements specification and testing.

ExtenSys worked closely with the Data Maintenance Team, ORMS project team, data conversion vendor, GIS software supplier and the OMS software supplier.

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