A Network Model for the Utility Domain

Abstract

The existing network models in geographic information systems that are used to support the utility domain (e.g., water, wastewater, sewer, gas, electric, and telecommunications) have limitations and constraints that restrict the ability of these utility companies to effectively and accurately model the rapidly increasing complexity and sophistication of their networks. This is caused by the fact that utility domain places a very different set of requirements on a network model and the associated analytic operations compared to those, commonly found in transportation and social networks. Although many utilities have succeeded in implementing production systems on top of simple graph models, the solutions have often involved either having to author considerable amounts of custom application code to go with the model (an expensive and cumbersome proposition), or modifying their workflows in order to compensate for the limitations of the underlying graph model. This paper introduces a new utility-centric graph information model that is designed to directly support the complex modeling of utility infrastructures. The model is focused on supporting additional requirements for improved performance and scalability (by optimized data storage layouts), efficiency and productivity (by modeling of real-world concepts like devices with multiple terminals, inside-plant, etc.), data quality (by enforcing a business rule-based framework which prevents bad data from entering the system), real-time data acquisition (by supporting for field-based telemetry such as Advanced Meter Infrastructure -- AMI, and Supervisory Control