Arcos

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a business-centric IT architectural approach that supports integrating your business as linked, repeatable business tasks, or services. SOA has the potential to fundamentally alter how business systems interact.

People have gotten used to the idea of having one system of record for data that shares information with all systems across the enterprise. Now with SOA, it is possible to talk about a “system of process,” where business processes occur in the application that is the most efficient and use these processes with other enterprise software to tightly integrate the entire enterprise and treat it as one, seamless series of business processes.

A service is a function that is well-defined, self-contained, and does not depend on the context or state of other services. By using services that others have already created and tested, utilities can increase the speed and reliability of adding new functionality and adapting to changing processes.

SOA provides a more exible IT structure, allowing the utility to focus on providing better customer service while leveraging existing information more effectively, and helping their employees work smarter and faster. SOA allows even small to midsize utilities to assemble and maintain innovative software. SOA helps utilities build composite applications, which are applications that draw upon
functionality from multiple sources within and beyond the enterprise to support horizontal business processes.

SOA is essentially a collection of services. These services communicate with each other. The communication can involve either simple data passing or it could involve two or more services coordinating some activity. Some means of connecting services to each other is needed.

Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative (SMECO) is the 6th largest cooperative in the United States. As a cooperative, SMECO has unique regulatory requirements that often preclude the purchase of IT products that have many modules spanning disparate user communities. Instead, SMECO focuses on best of breed applications where the out of box functionality most closely aligns with the utility’s business processes.

This focus often leads to data and functionality overlap and a decision needs to be made as where to house the data, how to coordinate updates across systems and which systems work best for a particular business process. It also requires an extensive integration effort to keep all the systems synchronized. For SMECO, robust middleware and service oriented architecture are essential tools to accomplish their IT goals.

One example of the need to determine which IT package to perform a business process is the daily assembly of linemen crews. SMECO has recently implemented a Mobile Workforce Management package which has the ability to assemble crews each day for management within the package.

Prior practice had the Distribution Service Operators (DSO) re-creating the crews, already
available in ARCOS in the Mobile Workforce product. This limited the amount of attention the DSO could concentrate on the system early in the morning. Since a limited number of DSO’s had to create over 60 crews, this was a time consuming process.

The responsibility now rests with the Crew Chief, the person most knowledgeable about the crew and their availability. The Chief reviews his crew each morning in ARCOS, making any changes to the personnel assigned to his truck, and within seconds, that crew is available for dispatch in SMECO’s Mobile Workforce Management package.

The interface was written to be expandable as SMECO moves forward in its centralization project. At 6:00 a.m. each morning, a process separate from the ARCOS application creates a document that actually initiates the interface. This was done to allow for substituting a publish/subscribe or a request/response interface to be implemented at a later date as the business processes develop. The interface creates the crew in the mobile workforce management package by creating a new crew using the CreateCrew routine and associates the Crew Chief with a truck. Then the interface then adds the crew, one member at a time, to the truck using the ChangeCrew routine. This only affects the regularly scheduled crews on the day shift.

Later on, SMECO hopes to add interfaces to create crews after hours and in storm situations and to interface the mobile workforce management product with their timekeeping application.

Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative, Hughesville, MD
John J. Simmins
Sudershan Singh
Deven Soni
Gopal Veeraraghava
Adam Vincent

 

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