{"id":19683,"date":"2021-09-22T00:10:00","date_gmt":"2021-09-22T07:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/copperleaf-test.majortom.dev\/feature-article-optimising-national-grid-uk-electricity-transmission-assets-with-the-copperleaf-decision-analytics-solution\/"},"modified":"2022-12-23T17:12:28","modified_gmt":"2022-12-24T01:12:28","slug":"feature-article-optimising-national-grid-uk-electricity-transmission-assets-with-the-copperleaf-decision-analytics-solution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/copperleaf-test.majortom.dev\/en\/blog\/feature-article-optimising-national-grid-uk-electricity-transmission-assets-with-the-copperleaf-decision-analytics-solution\/","title":{"rendered":"Feature Article: Optimising National Grid UK Electricity Transmission Assets with the Copperleaf Decision Analytics Solution"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article originally appeared in the September 2021 newsletter of the International Federation of Operational Research Society (IFORS)<\/a>. Composed of 50 national Operational Research (OR) societies, IFORS\u00a0is a network by which OR professionals\u00a0can exchange news, information, and ideas.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Background \"\"<\/h4>\n

National Grid Electricity Transmission (NGET) owns and manages the distribution of electricity throughout the UK, which includes in excess of 60,000 assets. These include the familiar towers (pylons) supporting the cables which carry the electricity around the UK, plus associated circuit breakers, instrument transformers, grid transformers, and more. Maintaining the performance of these assets is an investment plan worth between \u00a3800 million and \u00a31 billion a year, so the value of effective optimisation is very high.<\/p>\n

Because the assets deteriorate over time, they need to be taken out of service for maintenance and\/or refurbishment at regular intervals. This results in a loss of supply (outage) for the circuit containing that asset, which can be very costly. However it is possible to service more than one asset at the same time in a given circuit, a process called bundling, which will reduce the number of outages and hence the cost incurred.<\/p>\n

Every outage comes with an associated direct and indirect cost. Outages must also be carefully coordinated so as not to disrupt the electricity transmission network. For example, it might be determined that out of a set of four circuits, only one may be taken out within a one-year period. Since each intervention also requires resources, such as personnel and spare parts, the planners must schedule these at a time when they are available. So the technical challenge is to find the optimal intervention schedule for each asset in the transmission network, while considering the benefits of bundling gains, the outage costs and resource constraints, plus any relevant business rules.<\/p>\n

Copperleaf\u00ae<\/sup> has its headquarters in Vancouver and provides decision analytics to companies facing the challenges of managing critical infrastructure. Their enterprise software solutions leverage operational, financial and asset data to empower their clients to make investment decisions that deliver the highest business value. This project was carried out by their UK-based team.<\/p>\n

The Solution<\/h4>\n

Historically, the planning process had been manual, relying on\u00a0a planner using his\/her experience to recognise potential bundling opportunities, then building all the resource and outage requirements together into a deliverable package.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, this approach could not take account of the non-linear calculations involved in estimating outage durations, since each viable solution will result in a different level of outage. This is a disadvantage of the manual approach. NGET and Copperleaf worked together to find improved solutions by combining the power of Copperleaf\u2019s Decision Analytics Solution and its consulting and software development expertise, together with the engineering knowledge and prototypes that had been nurtured within NGET over the years.\u00a0<\/span>The innovative solution enables NGET to run network-wide optimisations involving more than 60,000 assets. These optimisations consider more than 5,000 interventions per year; 50 teams, each with up to five different resource types; and 100 overlapping boundaries for circuit constraint management.<\/p>\n

Implementation<\/h4>\n

Once NGET managers could see the potential benefits from the new optimised solution, they decided to embed it as a central part of their standard asset investment planning process.<\/span><\/p>\n

While the prototype algorithm was developed using Python scripting, NGET made a conscious decision to implement the finished solution using a commercial off-the- shelf software package. The Copperleaf solution integrates asset, maintenance and investment data from existing enterprise systems, thus automating the data input process through eight programmatic integrations s) which run either:<\/span><\/p>\n