Behind every well-functioning control room, you’ll find two critical factors: comprehensive data and good coffee.

While we can’t help you with the coffee, we certainly know a thing or two about putting the right data in front of teams of users, whether they’re working on the designs that underpin control room processes or in the control room itself. In this week’s blog, we’ll share how our SmartVU graphical user interface, Product Development System (PDS), and Data Forwarding capabilities help keep your control room operating smoothly with:

• More data sharing and collaboration capabilities
• Improved navigation and usability to increase efficiency and productivity
• Enhanced edit and design capabilities in an offline QA environment

Empower teams with a UI designed for collaboration and ease-of-use

The simplest way to make data more accessible is a single user interface for your ADMS. Whether your team is editing in an offline environment or making split-second decisions in your control room, they’ll be most productive and effective when they’re using a common UI. (Learn how SmartVU’s single, interactive view helps Oakville Hydro get the most out of its SCADA and OMS systems.)

With SmartVU, your team can easily view, manage, edit, and share information across design and production environments. SmartVU’s editing capabilities enable operators to:

• Maintain optimal readability, no matter what the map size. Sometimes you want the big picture and other times it’s the details you care about. Either way, SmartVU’s minimum and maximum display size for status pmacros ensures key information is always easy to read. Zoom out without losing the visibility to view field points like elbows, fuses and switches, or zoom right in while clearly distinguishing between closely grouped devices.
• Improve productivity and collaboration. Enable teams to complete work faster by converting single line diagrams and other views to submaps that can be edited by multiple users simultaneously.
• Increase security with more timeout options. Whether you choose to timeout privileged users only or all system users, our new release gives you greater control over session lengths.

Protect your production system with offline design and testing

Operators need a system they can rely on for accuracy and uptime, with an intuitive user interface that enables them to quickly and easily navigate to the views, maps, and information they need.

But systems need to be configured, edited, and upgraded to maintain optimal performance and that introduces the potential for errors – unless you use SurvalentONE PDS. With SurvalentONE PDS, you can design the system to your needs, test it thoroughly, and approve proposed changes before taking them live so you can be confident your production system will work exactly as you need it to. PDS capabilities include:

• The ability to journal and publish changes made to:
  • Transformers and service locations imported from GIS
  • Edits made by the IED Wizard
  • Any DMS Catalog edits, including those made in Compositions, Conductor Types, Impedances, Constructions, Load Profiles, Time Curves, and Settings.
• Gain a complete understanding of edits performed in each project. Review comprehensive information in the Work Summary Report, including SCS edits; STC Explorer database edits such as points and RTUs; additions, modifications, and deletions of individual line sections; and the total number of changes per line section type.
• Prevent conflicts. When multiple users collaborate on a project, it’s easy to make contradictory changes to data that can cause issues in production. SurvalentONE PDS eliminates the risk by preventing the edit of a command sequence if its referenced points are being edited by another project that has not been published yet.

Ensure your designs work with your network data 

When it comes to publishing changes into production, there’s no greater peace of mind than knowing they were created and tested using data from your own network.

Survalent’s Data Forwarding capabilities enable external support systems like SurvalentONE PDS or Operator Training Simulator (OTS) to use data from your active control system in their projects. Data Forwarding, includes:

• An option to automatically send and receive data upon system start-up
• A choice of forwarding changes for all points or for telemetered points only
• The ability to turn Data Forwarding on or off from within SmartVU

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