Area surveillance

 

The purpose of the Area surveillance is that each operator should only need to see relevant outages and notification (called events below). It is possible to select if the events should be shown or not for each separate bay in primary substations and power substations. Power operation areas, stations and bays form a hierarchy. There is a button in the toolbar (an eye) to display the hierarchy in a tree structure. In this tree, it is possible to include or exclude entire operation areas or stations, all at the same time.

 

Besides allowing each operator to filter which events that should appear, there is also a function to ensure that all events are visible to someone at all times. If an events takes place in a bay that is not supervised by an operator, it appears for all the operators. It is hence better that everything is supervised so that the events are not shown for an unnecessary amount of operators. For this reason, a warning dialog is shown when changes from supervised to unsupervised occur.

Note! That a situation as described above, does not mean that events during unsupervised bays are not visible to anyone, it means that they are visible to everyone.

 

How to change the filtering

The filtering is changed by using the dialog Area surveillance which is shown when you press on the eye in the toolbar. It is possible to manually include or exclude power operation areas, stations or individual bays. It is also possible to copy everything that another user/session is supervising. This dialog is described in the section Surveillance of areas, stations and bays.

 

How the filtering is removed or decayed

When Operator or the application is closed, the server is normally announced so that it is aware about that this session is no longer supervising anything. However, it is possible that this signal is not received if e.g the application crashes or that the network connection is broken. To detect that specific cases, a "ping" is sent from the clients every 30th second (configurable). If the server has not received anything from the clients within 5 minutes (configurable timeout) the session will be removed from the supervising. If this leads to that something becomes unsupervised a warning message will be sent and is shown in a dialog.

 

How the filtering is inherited

Each time you log into the application results in a new session in the area surveillance. If you have two instances of the application running, it is possible to have different filtering in these even though you are using the same user name.

When starting Operator the filtering is initially inherited from existing sessions on the same computer. This can be active session or recently ended sessions (all sessions that has not expired according to the 5 minutes regulation above) will be inherited regardless if the user has logged out or not. Sessions with the same user name and latest ping-time gives priority (in that order).

The inherited filtering helps if you for some reason need to close and restart the application e.g. shift change when a new user needs to log in etc.

 

The content of the filtering tree

The filtering tree contains a hierarchy of power operation areas, stations and bays. Bays that are located in primary substations and power substations and has any of the states In use, Out of operation (planned, designed or destroyed) are included. Transformer bays are not included. Bays are included regardless if they are situated on the up side or down side of the station (provided that they have the field scada_feeder set to 1).

There are also some special nodes that are described in more detail below:

•Regional networks for outages on high voltage levels.

•Unknown to capture various types of errors.

 

How events are classified to different nodes in the filtering tree

The basic principle is that each outage is classified to a leaf in the area filtering tree i.e. a node without sub nodes. These represents most likely bays in stations, but there are also other types of leafs. When an outage is classified to a node in the filtering tree, it means that the outage (and the notifications related to it) becomes visible only if you have included it in the node or if the node is unsupervised, i.e. not included by anyone.  

The regulation that decides where an outage will be situated in the tree is described below. The tripping device, that is referred to, is the object that the outage was created on (the object on the first row in the switch order). See also the exceptions that are described below regarding what is situated under the node Unknown.

 

1.If the tripping device has a voltage level < 30kV or the tripping device has a voltage level <= 30kV and the object is forced to a local network (see separate section), the following regulations applies (the feeding primary substation and bays are displayed in e.g. the attribute form for the outage):

•If the outage has a feeding bay, it becomes situated on the node for the bay.

•If the outage has a feeding primary station but no bay, it becomes situated "Above the bay", under the station node.

 

2.If the tripping device has a voltage level >= 30kV the outage becomes situated in the node Regional network (actually Regional network > Regional network > Regional network).

 

The node "Unknown"

On the same level as power operation areas in the filtering tree there is also a node that is called Unknown. This node has three types of sub nodes:

1.Feeding station/bay is missing in the surveillance tree: Captures the outages whose feeding station/bay is non existent in the tree (this should not occur, but gets graded for cases like if the system is configured in a wrong way). Even outages with a deleted tripping device since the feeding information was last saved, ends up here.

2.Outages that lacks a feeding station: Captures the outages that do not have any feeding station. If outages like this occurs, it is most likely due to inaccuracies in the network (or that the tripping device is not located in or under a primary substation).

3.All the bays that does not have an operating section (power operation areas) are located under Unknown, grouped under its stations. This is also valid for region network station (note that outages on >= 30kV are filtered under the node Region network and not under Unknown if the tripping device is not forced to a local network). The stations that only exists under Unknown (i.e stations that do not have any bays with an operating section set) also has the sub node Above bay.

 

Force an object to a local network

Tripping devices on the voltage level >= 30kV normally belongs to the special node Region network. You can, however, control so that the tripping devices becomes situated below the feeding bay instead. This is done by selecting Area surveillance in the attribute form and set the field "Force to specific net" to local net. This change can, and will probably normally be done, from the documentation application. The change needs to be posted in order for it to be valid. It is also possible to change the field "Fore to specific net" to "Regional net". The change needs to be posted in order for it to be valid.