Situation
A Dubai utility’s smart grid strategy, encompassing two million meter points and sensors, is central to its vision of becoming a world-class electric and water digital utility. Operating as three distinct organizations for electric transmission, electric distribution, and water networks, the utility has a number of disparate systems that were unable to exchange information. As part of its strategy to align business and technology capabilities, the company sought to deliver advanced asset performance management, electric vehicle smart charging, distributed energy resource management, and automated demand response. It also planned to create a distribution command center. These initiatives would require the utility to integrate multiple application components and correlate their information, allowing data flow to support smart grid use cases.
Solution
Wipro recognized several key business challenges, from core domain architecture groupings and high-level inter-app touchpoint provisions to scalability and security. The Smart Grid Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) platform leveraging TIBCO Business Works addressed four ESB instances in multiple cores of the utility’s landscape. By implementing Smart Grid ESB, the utility achieved the necessary integration among different systems and enabled interfaces between enterprise information technology (IT), operational technology (OT), smart grid/AMI, and external and customer systems.
The platform also enabled the utility to build a wide range of business services that exchanged data across various systems. Using an IEC Common Information Model (CIM), the services could be deployed and reused across the enterprise to reduce complexity, enable scalability, improve integration, and deliver adaptability and agility to the entire system. It also ensured a future-proof integration platform that supported new or replacement systems with minimal or no changes.
With its TIBCO ESB system, the Dubai utility gained a gateway for all application requests from its mobile application and portal. Using the platform, users could check their charger status, account information and usage information directly through the mobile application. They could also start and stop the charging of their electric vehicle through the mobile app’s APIs.
From an operational standpoint, the utility was finally able to integrate the EV Charge Point Management System with the Asset Health Center, a big data analytics platform that provides information about EV charger devices, charger usage, and EV faults. The system also provided comprehensive meter information for improved transparency across its smart grid network.
Business Outcomes
This comprehensive approach helped integrate the utility’s existing systems across IT, electric OT and water OT. With some EV services now available via mobile phones, customers were empowered to manage their affairs through an intuitive omni-channel interface. Customers also benefitted from more-accurate billing and real-time information about their electricity consumption through a unified Smart Dubai platform.
The new system has helped the utility minimized its field visits and reduced customer incidents by 30%. It can also now remotely monitor smart meters, saving the utility both time and money.
With integrations built on industry-standard schemas such as CIM and multi-speak, the utility further gained reusability and seamless compatibility of integration services with new systems. It also accelerated the creation of advanced smart grid use cases, simplified information exchange, standardized data types, and helped achieve vendor independence through industry standards.