Across the utilities industry, infrastructure renewal cycles offer once in a generation opportunities for laying the foundations of new business models. Such changes are both purely cyclical and motivated by new regulatory requirements, economic models, and environmental challenges. However, a common theme regardless of the utility is the deployment of ‘smart’ infrastructures ranging from the distribution network (for example, in substations) down to the customer premises (for example, meters).
Challenges facing the Utilities Industry
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The deployment of a next generation network and customer-premises equipment presents new challenges for infrastructure management. Next-generation monitoring management and infrastructure:
- Leads to increased control and monitoring data volume
- Requires increased investments in the communications infrastructure, which in turn require increased analysis and control capabilities.
- Can have unpredictable impacts on asset maintenance and renewal operations
- Can result in new customer demands for visibility of consumption patterns and options.
Complicating these scenarios are the requirements to simultaneously support existing infrastructure, which delivers utility service to customers, while incrementally deploying new-generation infrastructure. Additionally the rapid convergence of traditional monitoring, automation, and control approaches with information and communications technologies allows for new integrations across network monitoring and control infrastructures.
The significance of these challenges increases with the realization that solving them does not directly increase customer revenue. Utility providers are therefore faced with a complex set of technical and business problems which must be addressed costeffectively.
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The deployment of intelligent devices throughout the network offers many advantages:
- Enhanced control and integration at the network edge
- Greater customer visibility and participatory decision making
- More and smarter network-oriented applications
- Better informed distribution management and control decision making
- Cost reductions from fewer manual interactions.
Key Functional Requirements
Key functional requirements for smart infrastructures include:
- Capability to handle and analyze large numbers of events (billions per day)
- Distributed and/or consolidated monitoring of event streams, with analysis and response functionality
- Inbuilt support for local, regional, and global summaries and aggregation of events
- Retention of historical events for decision support and planning.
Identifying partners who can deliver these capabilities and provide commercial leverage in the deployment of intelligent networks is critical for moving towards 21st century utility business models.
Event Zero Solution Overview
A pioneer in next generation monitoring solutions, Event Zero is the first company to bring to market a complete enterprise-class monitoring platform based on industry leading event processing network technologies. The Event Zero next generation monitoring platform enables customers to utilize the power of event processing locally or across the enterprise to acquire real-time Operational Intelligence (OI).
The Event Zero monitoring solution allows organizations to rapidly respond to situations impacting their business, and promptly enable new business solutions. The Event Processing Network infrastructure platform is explicitly designed for large scale, diverse source, high-volume event data collection with realtime correlation and analysis.
In the utilities industry, continuous, real-time data collection from network edge intelligent infrastructures, such as smart meters, can be supported alongside sourcing from traditional infrastructure such as RTUs. Local and regional aggregation can inform local and regionally based control actions, while the summarized data from local and regional contexts can be relayed to national or global operations management centers.
Advantages of the Event Zero Event Processing Network for utilities include:
- Native distributed architecture is a very close match to utility distribution monitoring and control environments.
- High-performance, scalable infrastructure has been designed specifically to address issues inherent in intelligent network edges.
- Built-in event distribution back out to third-party applications and data points (for example, RTUs, transformers, or substations).
- Independence from traditional infrastructure suppliers allows diverse preference selection for physical infrastructure while retaining a single monitoring and control fabric.
- Direct integration with other enterprise infrastructure such as network operations, asset management, and IT service management through leading vendor alliances.
- Powerful rules-based distributed analysis engine.
In partnership with Event Zero, utilities can acquire industry-leading, technological capability on which to deliver their business transformation.
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