New system lets Transco more accurately match supply and
demand
National Grid Transco has completed the roll-out of a £70m
computer system that will allow the firm to control gas
transmission across the UK more efficiently by accurately matching
supply and demand.
The system integrates physical control of gas transmission with
financial decision making by analysing 20 million pieces of data
each hour from telemetry systems on the transmission grid.
Transco developed the Integrated Gas Management System, which
went live last month, in response to changing regulations in the
energy sector.
The Java-based system, which runs on Unix, Windows and Sun
servers, is critical to the running of the gas transmission
network, which provides about half of the UK's energy needs.
"We have implemented a huge management information system," said
Transco programme director Carole Connolly. "There are huge
business benefits, in that it allows us to bring the physical
decisions together with the business decisions."
The system allows Transco to tailor gas distribution by making
automatic hourly predictions of supply and demand across the
transmission network from an analysis of historical customer data
and weather forecasts.
Transco previously used an army of staff with spreadsheets to
predict demand. This method meant data could not easily be updated
when there were changes, said Transco business implementation
manager Chris Giles.
"We used to have a problem when we amended business-critical
data. It would not replicate across the whole of the system. Now we
have a mechanism that can correct information at the source and
allow it to ripple through. We know we have a single version of the
truth," he said.
Transco has invested in three back-up systems to ensure that any
outages in the system will last no longer than 15 minutes. It has
two sets of hardware at a datacentre in Hinckley and two more at a
centre elsewhere in the Midlands.
Transco began work on the project four years ago, collaborating
with a range of suppliers, and initially managing the project
in-house. It transferred responsibility for systems integration to
Indian outsourcing firm Wipro two years ago.
"We wanted better management control and to try to move some of
the risk over to a single party, rather than keeping the risk
in-house," said Connolly.
The project went live smoothly last month and, unusually for a
project of this scale, has so far shown no teething problems.
"It has got to be the smoothest implementation we have seen. It
went live on 6 June in a parallel run and we have not experienced
any issues," said Connolly.
Saurabh Arvind, project manager at Wipro, said the project
involved many technical challenges and required Wipro staff to be
rapidly trained in Java programming.
"We have not had an implementation on this scale. To train 250
people up on Java to this quality level was in itself a big
challenge," he said.
Technology behind the UK's gas supply
Hardware
- 28 HP Superdome partitions
- 4 Sun servers
- 20 Windows servers
- 36Tbytes of disc storage
Software
- 46 different systems, including Oracle 9iAS and Business
Objects
- Network manager from CSE Servelec controls network and alerts
IT staff to potential problems
- Business applications provide a commercial overview of the
network and schedule maintenance
- MIS datawarehouse records real-time telemetry data, produces
supply and demand forecasts and generates management
reports
Performance
- 99.95% availability
- Four-second response time for critical screens
- 5,000 batch processes
- 120 records per second data flow rate
- Interfaces to 17 external systems.