Have you tried jogging in dress shoes? You can do it, but not without hurting your feet. Same goes with ADMS offline environments – you can certainly edit in your production environment but at what cost? There’s always a reason behind purpose-built products.
70% of all data loss is caused by human error. Irrespective of how experienced your operator or administrator is, mistakes are bound to happen, especially when you’re dealing with stretched work hours and multi-tasking in a control room. Without automatic backups or warning messages in a production environment, even the simplest editing tasks become risky.
An offline environment can help you protect your data, prevent errors like erasing the wrong substation, and help you plan and evaluate various network scenarios – all without impacting the production environment. The question is – which offline environment do you need for which scenario?
We’ve broken down our offline environment applications to help you understand how each serves your different needs:
• Project Development System (PDS) – PDS is a near real-time replica of your production environment that allows you to safely design, edit, test, and approve proposed changes to your ADMS platform in an offline environment. It allows multiple users to create concurrent projects, test all network changes, and then seamlessly publish them into production. The reservation system prevents conflicts and data loss, even when your administrators are collaborating on the same project. You can conduct point-to-point testing to field devices such as RTUs, IEDs or gateways. You can even set up your PDS projects to receive near real-time data from the production server, creating an ultra-realistic test environment with up-to-date displays.
• Quality Assurance System (QAS) – QAS is purpose-built to enable offline testing of new Survalent kits, windows updates, third-party software updates, patches, configuration changes, and to perform hardware tests. This offline environment creates a mirrored ADMS production environment in a test setting. You can functionally replicate any Survalent product or server in the QAS to test how the new software or devices will operate in a variety of scenarios before applying them to your production environment. Unlike PDS, it is not near real-time and does not allow multiple users to work at the same time.
• Operator Training Simulator (OTS) – With OTS, you can train your operators and dispatchers on ADMS in a risk-free offline environment. You can prepare detailed scripts that simulate changes in your network to help your operators learn in a very realistic environment without having to wait and learn on the job in high-pressure situations. It also allows you to take snapshots of your production system and database and create separate studies for different user groups. There is an offline OTS mode for SmartVU, Survalent Explorer, and ADMS Manager so your operators can gain comprehensive training in all the software they will be using.
• Study Mode – Survalent’s Study Mode, part of the Operational Analysis Environment, addresses this problem by enabling operators to execute their switch orders and other operations in an offline environment first where they can investigate the effects before proceeding in the production system. If the simulated actions yield the intended result, the operator can execute them in production when needed. If not, the operator can simply modify the set of actions and run more simulations until the objective is achieved. An add-on module for Study Mode is the Power System Simulator (PSS) so operators have the offline power flow functions available including pre-switch validation, to assess how their actions would change the network’s electrical characteristics.
• Playback – the Playback application, part of the Operational Analysis Environment, helps you learn from historical events such as storms, accidents, and equipment failures, and then effectively incorporate those insights into future planning. You can review how previous events evolved in the network, and how they have contributed to decisions made during these significant events. Configurable settings let you set the playback speed and time range; step through the event by time periods, alarms, or events; and watch the SmartVU map update from any location within the map.
The right kind of offline environment helps make routine tasks simpler without impacting the production system and ensures better auditing capabilities. Working in an environment that mirrors the production environment, you can get better control of change approval and validation and reduce risk in your existing systems.
Not sure which offline environment is best suited for your current needs? Don’t worry, we’ve got you. Our expert product team is always here to guide you.
Contact us to learn more.
