CURENT Seminar – Defining Big Data in the Utility Industry

Date: January 30, 2015

Time: 12:20-1:10pm EST

Location: Room 124 Min H. Kao Building, Knoxville, TN

Title: Defining Big Data in the Utility Industry

Presenter: Mr. Stan McHann 

Bio: Stan McHann has worked for Milsoft for 4 years in different technical roles, currently serving as Director of Software Development. Before Milsoft, Stan worked for Landis+Gyr as Director of Technology, and has held senior technical positions at 3Com,Dell, and Tandem Computers. Stan has been granted 8 U.S. Patents, most of which are algorithm patents related to control and analysis of power grids and has also published papers related to big data and analytics.

Abstract: Each electric utility has a mission: to provide customers with economical and reliable electric energy service. To help carry out this mission, utilities use a variety of software applications. Staking, Geospatial Information System (GIS), Outage Management System (OMS), Customer Information System (CIS), SCADA, AMI/AMR, Engineering Analysis (EA), and mobile applications that all rely on the same data infrastructure to operate. Milsoft’s Core Engineering and Operations (Core E&O) System provides a data platform for all of these applications to work. Core E&O enables the staking application to be the entry point for new construction. The data captured by staking moves through the Core E&O system to Engineering Analysis and GIS without the need to re-enter data. Once the data that was captured by staking is verified, it moves on to OMS and other applications that can again use the information without the need to re-enter the information. As EA is being required to do more real-time analysis, sensors in the electric grid and interfaces with more systems are emerging. We will discuss how Core E&O will handle the surge of information that will need to be processed and also discuss if the surge of information is actually a big data problem or not.