A Novel System for Automatic Generation of Service Reliability Report from AM/FM Systems

Audience: Reliability Engineers and Personnel, Information Technology, Operational and Planning Engineers

Service reliability reports play an important role in power industry management. Traditionally, those reports have been composed manually from a vast amount of information scattered over several departments of the company. The process of manually composing reports is tedious and susceptible to mistakes. We have developed a novel system that automatically generates all of the necessary standard PSC reports, the enterprise internal-use reports, and the query-by-example reports. The system is being used in NYSEG on a daily basis. The developed system is a subsystem of the NYSEG trouble management system.

This new system for automatically generating reliability reports contains two major parts. The first part is responsible for gathering the reliability information for the report. The input of this part is through the AM/FM system. It has direct access to the entire data of the trouble call management environment i.e. distribution network connectivity, device status, customer information system and switching action history. The reliability information is computed by tracing network connectivity according to the switching action history and customer-count information. The second part of the system is the report generator part. It builds a bridge between the user and the gathered reliability information by offering a user-friendly interface to input the report requirements. Then it calls the report engine to create the desired report based on those requirements and the gathered reliability information. The user-friendly interface and the flexibility are the two most important and unique features of the system.

This novel system has a simple and effective graphical user interface. A single major dialog box represents the interface for the entire system. Through this dialog box, users can input all the requirements in order to obtain the desired report. Users can choose from 13 built-in report types, of which 5 are PSC standard reports and 8 are reports for NYSEG internal use. Users can set 17 selection criteria, of which 5 refer to outage type, 9 refer to outage location and 3 refer to report duration. The report can be displayed on the screen, sent to the printer or saved as one of several popular spreadsheet files. The service reliability report system was developed in Visual C++ 5.0. The response time of the tool is very fast. It has been embedded into the NYSEG trouble management environment and has been operated by the Reliability Reporting department with very good results.