DH.GIS (District Heating Geographic Information System) is a Smallworld-based system designed for district heating companies. The GE Smallworld environment, enriched with Globema’s functional modules, constitutes a powerful system for fast and convenient data access, reporting, statistics, investment planning and resource management.

Network Inventory – the core of DH.GIS

The inventory data model includes all kinds of objects presented on the map as well as those without geographic reference: line segments, heat chambers with their internals, valving, automation devices, meters, compensators, pumps and other network devices, heat sources, heat nodes with internal fittings, heat exchangers, buildings, parcels and other supplementary objects. DH.GIS has tools for attaching digital maps in formats like DXF/DWG, DGN, raster, WMS/WFS, OpenStreetMap and Google Maps.

Benefits of network inventory

  • Reduction of the time of accessing documentation
  • Reduction of field visits (as well as costs and working time related to them) which were performed in order to gather information or check network data
  • Access to data by authorized users 24 hours per day.

Outage Management Support

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

  • Disconnecting an affected area with the nearest working valves that have to be closed
  • Generating cut-off notices for all disconnected customers
  • Estimating the amount of energy not supplied to customers
  • Calculating time needed to refill a disconnected part of a 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 specify, for example, which is the most faulty valve type or indicate area with frequent and dense outages.

Benefits of Outage Management

  • Shortening outage area identification time by a dispatcher (Independence from a distributed knowledge of individuals)
  • Smaller losses, fewer cut-off customers
  • More efficient damage repair planning Improvement in customer service quality.

Engineering Calculations

The module is capable of performing complex hydraulic and thermodynamic calculations of the network, such as:

  • Supply and return pressure at each node of the network
  • 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.

Benefits of Network Calculations

  • Heat losses points identification Identificiaton of over-measured or under-meausured network (2-5% of network)
  • Optimal (precise) network regulation – 1-3% savings on purchase of heating medium
  • Ensurance of deliveries during outage (in ring-shaped networks and multisource networks) – 10%
  • Decrease of losses within a network consequential to proper measurement – measurement better adjusted to given needs (losses smaller up 1-3 %)
  • Additional incomes from better settling down used energy.

Investment Planning

The module enables investment planning activities in details, such as network extension or reconstruction, and new customer connections. A number of reports can be generated, including bills of materials, estimated cost of the investment over time, cost schedule, as well as simple ROI analysis that takes into account the investment cost, operations cost and energy sale schedule.

Benefits of  Investment Planning

  • Time savings of up to 25% in the whole process of investment planning and connecting customers
  • Greater accuracy of investment decisions
  • Additional revenues from investments designed and performed in shorter periods of time (earlier activations).

Did you know?

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Globema DH.GIS and supportive mobile and web applications are used to manage, develop & maintain district heating network in over 70 cities.

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Over 10 million end-customers are connected to heating networks that are being modelled using Globema DH.GIS.

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Globema has over 20 years of experience in developing & deploying specialized solutions for district heating operators.