Transmission engineers often wear many hats at a utility, including performing regular inspections of existing facilities and new capital construction projects. At American Electric Power Transmission (‘AEP’), this used to involve filling out paper forms in the field and then transcribing the information in their custom-built Transmission Site Visit (‘TSV’) program. In 2019, SSP teamed up with AEP to replace the TSV program with a solution that offers mobile functionality and electric field forms for the engineers conducting field site visits and audits.
The new system needed to be more than just a mobile data collection form. Engineers typically perform site visits in the field, but often need to enter additional information after the visit. So, the data needed to accessible for update from a desktop location after the site visit was completed. Audits follow a similar workflow. Engineers are also expected to provide high-level capital project information within the survey that the get out of a separate system. Managers wanted the forms to provide extensive data validation to ensure that the data collected was accurate and complete. Finally, the Managers wanted to be able to generate reports on the surveys within the system and needed to be able to push all survey information into the AEP corporate data warehouse cross-system reporting.
The AEP team settled on a map-based solution hosted and managed within Esri’s Portal for ArcGIS and the result is AEP’s new Mobile Online Survey System (‘MOSS’) application. MOSS utilizes a custom Web App created in Web AppBuilder combined with 15 different surveys in Survey123. The MOSS application is available through secure connections into the AEP environment whether the user is connected at their desk to the AEP network, via their phone/device to the AEP Wi-Fi at a substation, or through a mobile cellular connection.
The MOSS application was configured to meet a variety of workflows. Engineers working in a mobile environment can use the Current Location widget to automatically center the map on their location, while Engineers working in the office could use the Search widget to locate a substation or transmission line. This makes it easy for the Engineer to select a Transmission Line or a Substation at which they are going to perform work at. Additional configuration helped to provide a complete user experience, including key tools like the Attribute Table, Editor, Smart Editor, Layer List, and Home widgets.
One custom widget was created as part of the project – the MOSS Site Selection widget. The MOSS Site Selection widget allows the user to choose a type of survey they are going to perform and then depending upon the survey, are presented with a list of substations or transmission lines in the current map extent to choose where the survey will be performed.
Additionally, the Engineer can populate information about the capital project by completing the BPID section of the form. The drop-down lists in this section of the widget read from a table that is updated nightly by a batch process to ensure that all current capital projects are available to the Engineer. The user first selects an Operating Company, the Station or Line from the capital projects system, and finally, a specific capital project for that location.
When ready to start the survey, the Engineer clicks on the “Create New Survey’ button which opens a new survey based upon the Survey Type they selected in Survey123 and populates a number of Survey Overview fields based upon the selected BPID information.
All surveys were configured to be as easy to use as possible on a mobile device. The main sections of the surveys could be collapsed to simplify navigation through the form and then expanded to collect information. Depending upon the response to a question, indicated that there was an abnormal situation, the corresponding comment would be made required to clarify what the issue was. Some sections in the surveys support repeats – the ability to collect 1 or more observations about a specific item. For instance, when an equipment audit is being performed, there for be 1 or more equipment standards under review for different components of a substation. Repeats are also used to collect photos, allowing the Survey respondent to add as many images to the survey as they felt was necessary to adequately document the survey findings.
With the initial survey complete, the Engineer can sync the results back to a feature service in Portal, allow access to the survey results for all members of the MOSS Portal group.
Additional data entry could be performed in the Web App using the Editor or Smart Editor tools if the Engineer had follow-up phone calls with others on the Transmission team. Finally, AEP IT created a nightly process to pull any new or updated surveys from the day into the AEP data warehouse where Managers can go to get reports on which engineers are performing surveys and what facilities are being surveyed, along with all capital project information and data from other AEP IT systems.
For a complete overview of the project from start to finish and all the technical tips and tricks, join John Thompson from AEP Transmission and myself on August 20th, for our Presentation: From Paper to Survey123: Updating the Transmission Inspection Process as part of the Digital iLLUMINATE webinar series.
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