Design and Development of an Information Collection System for Medium Voltage Distribution Network based on a Location-based Data Model

The continuous growth of cities, their populations, industrial and agricultural centers have led to an ever-increasing rise in subscribers’ demand, and power distribution networks as the last in the supply chain, alongside other sectors, should be responsive to the requirements of the community in various regions of the country. On the other hand, it’s inevitable to have a comprehensive understanding of the condition of the equipment and necessary actions which should be made in case of unexpected incidents in power distribution networks. Hence, across the country, several plans are established for the collection of information on the equipment of the power distribution network. The basic problem in this regard is the traditional way of collecting information, which does not allow logical control and the processing of the intermediate information and extraction of errors in all stages of data surveying. Consequently, numerous researches have been conducted with the purpose of the design and developing the appropriate data model considering the abovementioned issues. Many of the introduced models are suffering the absence of spatial aspect which is the primary goal of information collection plans and mainly focus on the complicated logics of power distribution networks. In contrast, other researchers take the spatial component of the model into consideration and neglect basic power distribution network concepts. Taking the precedent described models, it’s obvious that both types of models will fail in achieving the target defined for power distribution networks’ information collection plans. Therefore, the design and development of a location-based model with satisfactory simplicity resulting in accelerating the information collection procedure and adequate level of power distribution network concepts’ details is significantly indispensable. In this paper, an innovative attitude through faster collecting and controlling of information is addressed with state-of-the-art technologies in spatial information systems and a location-based data model is introduced to solve the before mentioned issues. In the first step, a location-based data model is designed to address the existing issues. Four main equipment whose location is of high importance are medium voltage poles, high voltage transformers, ground distribution posts, and ground medium voltage lines. Other equipment is mounted on the four location-based equipment and perceiving their relative position is ample for rebuilding the position of whole network equipment. In this way, we have improved the speed of the location assignment process. Afterward, for all devices, properties such as parent devices, connected devices, quantity, and textual attributes are defined. The defined properties are the keystone of the data model structure. In the next step, the mobile application is developed for data collection thanks to the Cordova platform allowing developers to produce their application in assorted mobile operating systems with a single same code. In addition, the collecting data application improves the positioning accuracy of equipment by exploiting aerial maps alongside the GPS sensor. The final output of the application is a single SQLite file. Eventually, the desktop application is implemented with the Electron platform, a Cordova counterpart in desktop operating systems, for checking logical errors of collected data due to users’ faults by analyzing the location and relation of equipment, as well as matching and joining of equivalent equipment from different data sets for data preparation in importing phase. At the evaluation stage, 450 km of medium voltage power distribution network, comprising of 37295 devices collectively, was processed and 92% of the network equipment was matched and imported. Best matched equipment includes medium voltage poles 99%, medium voltage isolators 98%, and overhead medium voltage lines 90%.