Esri Utility Network Electric Tracing

November 11, 2016 — Skye Perry  [6:27]

Esri has built many of the most common utility traces directly into the new Esri utility network. In this video, you’ll learn all about Esri utility network electric tracing. We will review several electric traces that are used by our customers every day including a full circuit trace, upstream trace, downstream trace, and protective device trace.

Learn about the SSP Utility Network Jumpstart program here.

Skye Perry will walk you through all the various components of electric tracing in the new utility network. Immerse yourself in circuits, map features, and feature classes. Skye will show you how to quickly display the information you need and work with tracing in your desktop or web application.

Learn how to

  1. Zoom to your specific features such as a substation
  2. Run traces
  3. Zoom to full extents
  4. View assets that are tied together
  5. Repeat traces
  6. Trace your entire circuit
  7. Identify that specific trace location
  8. And much more

After watching the video demonstration, you’ll be able to run a variety of traces for your utility, municipality organization, or cooperative.

 

Transcript

Hi this is Skye Perry with SSP Innovations. I'm here today to talk to you about some of the out of the box tracing functionality we have in the new Esri Utility Network based on the electric tracing for circuits.

I'm going to start off by taking a quick look at the circuits we are seeing on the screen. I see two circuits (a red and an orange one). As I click on these to identify them, I want you to note that this is RMT003. But more importantly this is an individual feature on the map as I flash that record on the map. So, this is a single line/feature that represents the entire circuit. Now on the south side as I go head and select RMT001, note that this is also a single circuit. For these two circuits, I'm showing a single feature for each, and this is automatically generated by the Utility Network into the SubNetLine feature class. Now this is key and it happens out of the box (nothing we have to do). But it does make color by circuits or color by systems. It is very easy to make. It is also easy and fast to display whether it is on the desktop or via your web application because we are only rendering a single feature per individual circuit.

So, with that let's go ahead and dig into some more of the detailed tracing functionality that we have available. I'm going to zoom in here to the north substation. I'm going to go ahead and select the breaker in the substation to begin our first trace. Specifically, we are going trace off the load side. A breaker has two terminals, source, and load. Of course, we are tracing downstream, so we would want to choose the low side. Next, we'll go ahead and choose the SSP Full Circuit Trace. This is simply an out of the box configuration utilizing Esri's underlying traces, and we are going to go ahead and run that. Now you see the selection of features come back on the screen, and we can zoom to the full extent of that trace.

You can see that it matches the RMT003 one line we just saw previously tying into the south circuit at the two tied switches as indicated here on the map. Now to prove that, let's go ahead and do the same trace on the south substation. This should light up the opposite. Once again, going into trace locations we will clear our existing and add a new. We'll grab this circuit breaker here and choose the low side. With that, we can just simply run the existing trace one more time, and you can see the returned records shown highlighted on the map. Again, we'll zoom to the full extent, and you can see that here. It is tying in the same location those two tie switches there into the northern most RMT003 circuit. So, that works very well (tracing the entire circuit).

Let's get into more detail. We are going to go ahead and zoom into a more local area here where we can see some service points. From this service point we are now going to identify that is our trace location. From this location on the map, we are going to go ahead and run the upstream trace. This trace executes and returns a selection. Once again, we will zoom to the extent of that selection. You can now see the full extent of that trace from the location here on the left, all the way back down south, heading east bound, and all the way back to the north substation. For this next trace, we are going to run the exact same component, but we are going to run a separate trace. Basically, a trace from a separate location but run a different trace. We are going to run the SSP Upstream Protective Device trace.

Again, this is a configuration off the out of the box. We'll go ahead and run this trace. The main difference here, we are no longer tracing lines. We are only tracing specifically the protective devices as defined in the Utility Network. So, you can kind of the see the various fuses and switches selected on the machine, but to show you a little bit more clearly, I'll flip over to the attributes. So, you can see the breaker which is located here on the substation. It may be hard to see it flashing. We have a number of fuses, and of course we have a number of switches. Again, that worked very well to identify that specific trace location.

Finally, let's zoom back to a similar location. We are going to do a downstream trace. So, in this case we are going to go ahead and grab the trace location of this transformer. We are going to trace the low side of that transformer. There we are going to go ahead and run a downstream trace. This trace will result out a number of downstream features. We can zoom to results. We can see the extent of that trace all the way out to that service points. Our final trace might be to go to a tap location within the network. Let's select a trace location, and just to note that we can select a point or a line. So, we can go grab this line here on the map, and from that line we can go ahead and do a downstream protective device trace. It is very similar to the upstream, but now we are going downstream. Once again, we can see the entire extent of the trace. Included in this, we only have two switches and three fuses. What if we wanted to include the structures in the trace? We'll run the same or similar downstream trace from that location, and this time we will check the "Include Structures" checkbox. We will go ahead and click the run button, and you can see the results there on the map.

T he key change with this trace is that if we go to attributes we of course have our transformers, elbows, fuses, service points, etc. But now we also have pads. Again, these will be pads defined as structures where we could zoom to each individual one of those, and we also have poles. So, there is no additional work required to be performed and no customization. We are able to trace out and return the structures based on any trace we performed within the Esri Utility Network. You've seen those options in all of the traces I have performed today. So, very simply, we can include the structures because they are in the network within any trace result. Final piece of information that I would like to show you is that the individual components in the traces (let's just take the transformers for example) are also maintaining the circuit name in this case, RMT003, is maintained as an attribute. Notice that is a read-only attribute. That is because the Utility Network is also maintaining that circuit name directly on my features.

This has just been a brief overview of the circuit tracing and circuit functionality within the Utility Network, stay tuned for more.

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Skye Perry

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