EC.GIS is a Smallworld-based system for district heating network inventory and management. Major cities in Middle-East and North Europe, as well as part of West Europe (for example Germany and Denmark) maintain extensive networks that supply residents, business and industry with heat energy for central heating and hot water, and, in summer, also air conditioning.

EC.GIS represents a real business value to a heating distribution company. The GE Smallworld environment, enriched with Globema’s functional modules, constitutes a powerful system for fast and convenient data access, reporting and statistics as well as resource management and planning.

Network Inventory

The inventory data model includes all kinds of objects to be presented on the map as well as those without geographic reference: line segment, heat chamber with its internals, valving, automation devices, meters, compensators, pumps and other network devices, heat source, heat node with internal fittings and heat exchangers, buildings and parcels, and other supplementary objects. The Network Inventory module as well as other modules take advantage of a rich set of generic enhancement modules developed by Globema (GLB-Modules), for example: enhanced object editors, Address Gazetteer, Excel reporting, commit reminder, change register, queries and reports, etc.

Outage Management Support

The module helps organize engineering and business activities around a network outage:

• disconnecting the affected area with the closest working valves that have to be closed,
• generating cut-off notices for all the disconnected customers,
• estimating the amount of energy not supplied to customers,
• calculating time needed to refill the disconnected part of the network,
• locating a leakage at a given distance from a fault locator.

A number of predefined statistical reports have been defined for this module to help organize prevention activities. The system will tell, for example, what is the most faulty valve type or indicate area with frequent and dense outages.

Engineering Computations

The module is capable of performing complex hydraulic and thermodynamic computations of the network.The computation process results in: supply and return pressure and temperature at each node of the network, carrier flow time from the heat source to each node of the network, pressure and temperature drop for each line segment, regulation parameters at each heat node, heat losses. The results are presented in a form of predefined queries and reports, as well as diagrams for a selected path. The Engineering Computations module is a powerful tool for network engineers responsible for network control and regulation, either in real-life operation or simulation mode.

Network Management Support

The system supports routine tasks of supply control staff, the main being valve switching and network regulation. Every switching action is registered with an exact date and time. Based on this, one may trace disconnected heat nodes and define the reason of non-supply time. This information is then used for appropriate billing. Using the powerful mechanism of version management, the user can carry out switching simulations, for example you can study a scenario of what happens if you change the network configuration for the whole or part of the network: what is the new supply coverage? is everybody connected? how do the hydraulic conditions change?

Investment Planning

The module makes it possible to plan investment activities in details, such as network extension or reconstruction, and new customer connections. A number of reports can be then generated, including bill of materials, estimated cost of the investment in time, cost schedule, as well as simple ROI analysis which takes account of the investment cost, operations cost and energy sale schedule.

Network Operations Support

This module supports network maintenance activities such as:

• fault reporting and management,
• technical inspections of the network constructions and devices,
• estimation of the technical state of the network, which is input to the repair and investment decision making process,
• maintenance work orders.

Software requirements

GE Smallworld Core Technology 4 or Core Technology 3.3

GE Smallworld IAS 2.1 or IAS 4