Merging top-down and bottom-up planning approaches

This weblog collection discusses the advanced duties vitality utility firms face as they shift to holistic grid asset administration to handle by way of the vitality transition. The primary submit of this collection addressed the challenges of the vitality transition with holistic grid asset administration. The second submit on this collection addressed the built-in asset administration platform and information trade that unite enterprise disciplines in several domains in a single community.

Breaking down conventional silos

Many utility asset administration organizations work in silos. A holistic method that mixes the siloed processes and integrates numerous planning administration methods offers optimization alternatives on three ranges:

1. Asset portfolio (AIP) stage: Optimum venture execution schedule
2. Asset (APMO) stage: Optimum upkeep and alternative timing
3. Spare half (MRO) stage: Optimum spare components holding stage

The mixed planning workouts produce budgets for capital expenditures (CapEx) and working bills (OpEx), and set minimal necessities for grid outages for the upcoming planning interval, as proven within the following determine:

Asset investments are usually a part of a grid planning division, which considers expansions, load research, new clients and long-term grid necessities. Asset funding planning (AIP) instruments deliver worth in optimizing numerous, generally conflicting, worth drivers. They mix new asset investments with current asset replacements. Nevertheless, they comply with completely different approaches to threat administration through the use of a threat matrix to evaluate threat at the beginning of an optimization cycle. This top-down course of is efficient for brand new belongings since no details about the belongings is on the market. For current belongings, a extra correct bottom-up threat method is on the market from the continual well being monitoring course of. This course of calculates the well being index and the efficient age based mostly on the asset’s particular degradation curves. Dynamic well being monitoring offers up-to-date threat information and correct alternative timing, versus the static method used for AIP. Combining the asset efficiency administration and optimization (APMO) and AIP processes makes use of this enhanced estimation information to optimize in actual time.

Upkeep and venture planning happen in operations departments. The APMO course of generates an optimized work schedule for upkeep duties over a venture interval and calculates the optimum alternative second for an current asset on the finish of its lifetime. The upkeep administration and venture planning methods load these duties for execution by area service departments.

On the upkeep restore and overhaul (MRO) facet, spare half optimization is linked to asset criticality. Failure mode and impact evaluation (FMEA) defines upkeep methods and related spare holding methods. The principle parameters are optimizing for inventory worth, asset criticality and spare half ordering lead instances.

Conventional planning processes concentrate on disparate planning cycles for brand new and current belongings in a top-down versus bottom-up asset planning method. This method results in suboptimization. An built-in planning course of breaks down the departmental silos with optimization engines at three ranges. Optimized planning ends in decrease outages and system downtime, and it will increase the environment friendly use of scarce sources and price range.

Learn extra about IBM® Maximo® APM for Power and Utilities