Just about all of our electric utility clients use Telvent Feeder Manager to manage the connectivity of their electric distribution (and some transmission) circuits. Feeder Manager is a great application that builds on the core value of an ESRI geometric network. I don’t want to get into the details of what a geometric network is or how they work here. Instead I want to focus on how Telvent manages the flow of electricity through a geometric network.

Feeder Manager maintains your electric connectivity as you edit the data within ArcMap by using a series of AutoUpdaters (Telvent GIS triggers).

The first thing that the AutoUpdaters (AU’s) do is read the key electric attributes from the current feature record being created/updated. These attributes include phase designation, normal status (open/closed), device type, etc.

To make the electric traces faster, Feeder Manager combines all of the important electric properties into a single field typically named MMElectricTraceweight. This is achieved by using a bit gate. A bit gate uses good ole binary bits – 1’s and 0’s to indicate whether specific property is true or false. As you may (or may not) remember from school, there are 8 bits in 1 byte and we can fit 4 bytes into an ESRI long integer field in the database. Therefore we essentially have 32 (4 bytes x 8 bits/byte) configurable true/false properties we can track about a feature record in the geometric network.

In the case of Feeder Manager, these 32 different bits indicate different electric properties of the feature record. These electric properties are defined by Telvent and can be found in the configuration help documentation. Point features (junctions) and linear features (edges) use different bits to indicate different electric properties. We’ve included some of the more important bits here:

So these bit gates are very cool in that we can have a single numeric field that tells us all of the information above. These bit gates can be used by the electric traces to determine the electric connectivity of a circuit. Processing this data is extremely fast because it is all numeric and ESRI provides special techniques for interacting with the bit gate during tracing, which further speeds things up.

In addition to the MMElectricTraceweight bit gate, Feeder Manager utilizes another bit gate field to store even more information about each electric feature as it relates to the rest of the circuit. This data is stored in the FeederInfo field. FeederInfo tracks the same data for junctions and edges including the following useful values:

FeederInfo Bit

Everything above is pretty common knowledge but what most folks don’t realize is that you can use the bit gate fields for your own analysis as well by writing queries against the data, using the data in your VBA or C#.Net scripts/apps, or even to visualize the data within ArcMap. Both SQL Server and Oracle provide functions to interpret individual bits within a bit gate. For example, if we wanted to find all of the overhead primary that exists within a loop, we could use a where clause like this:

Oracle:

where BitAnd(FeederInfo, Power(2, 6)) > 0;

SQL Server:

where (FeederInfo & Power(2, 6)) > 0;

The red value of 6 above is the bit we are filtering on from the FeederInfo bit gate. We can switch out this value with any other bit value from the above table to get back the relevant results. This is a very simple way to find all of your loops (6), islands (3), or multi-feeds (7) in your GIS data. You can plug this into the Definition Query tab of an ArcMap layer file to filter the data shown on the map:

Or plug it into the Select By Attributes tool to select all of the records on the map:

Or even use it when querying an ESRI Multi-Version View directly in the database:

Oracle:

select * from GIS.PrimaryOhLineSection_MV where BitAnd(FeederInfo, Power(2, 6)) > 0;

SQL Server:

select * from GIS.PrimaryOhLineSection_MV where (FeederInfo & Power(2, 6)) > 0;

If we combine the FeederInfo bit gate with the MMElectricTraceweight bit gate we can do some even more interesting things. One of my favorites is to query the data for dropped phases. A dropped phase is where the energized phases are less than the phase designation on the feature. For example, we might want to find all of the 3-Phase lines that are NOT energized on all three phases. This can occur for a variety of reasons within the data and might be important for us to correct if this data feeds an Outage Management System (OMS) or any other application that depends on the electric properties of the data. The following query is generic enough to return all records with any dropped phase (A, B, or C):

Oracle:

where (BitAnd(ElectricTraceWeight, Power(2, 3)) > 0 
and (BitAnd(FeederInfo, Power(2, 0)) = 0)
OR (BitAnd(ElectricTraceWeight, Power(2, 4)) > 0 
and (BitAnd(FeederInfo, Power(2, 1)) = 0)
OR (BitAnd(ElectricTraceWeight, Power(2, 5)) > 0 
and (BitAnd(FeederInfo, Power(2, 2)) = 0)

SQL Server:

where ((ElectricTraceWeight & Power(2, 3)) > 0 
and (FeederInfo & Power(2, 0)) = 0)
OR ((ElectricTraceWeight & Power(2, 4)) > 0 
and (FeederInfo & Power(2, 1)) = 0)
OR ((ElectricTraceWeight & Power(2, 5)) > 0 
and (FeederInfo & Power(2, 2)) = 0)

In the first half of the above queries, we are checking bits 3, 4, and 5 of the MMElectricTraceWeight bit gate which correspond to phases A, B, and C in the phase designation field on the record. We use the “> 0” operator to check for the existence of each phase. This indicates the bit is set to 1 (or true).

Then in the second half of the statement we are checking bits 0, 1, and 2 of the FeederInfo bit gate which correspond to the energized phases A, B, and C based on the electricity being fed into the record. Here we are using the “= 0” operator to look for phases that are not energized. This indicates the bit is set to 0 (or false).

When we combine these two queries we end up looking for records with phase A that are not energized on phase A, records with phase B that are not energized on phase B, and records with phase C that are not energized on phase C. Pretty cool stuff… hopefully this makes sense and you can start thinking of other ways you could use the above bit gates to validate the data in your GIS.

In summary, we’ve reviewed the two bit gate fields used by Telvent Feeder Manager, what each bit indicates, and how to query the individual bits in each field. Once you get these query patterns down you can create some very powerful views of your data that perhaps you never even knew were possible.