Smart Energy Utilities based on Real-Time GIS Web Services and Internet of Things

Abstract Problem: The power & electric outages cause business disruptions that result in economic impacts to cities. A web map service (WMS), as a RESTful API with URL, that makes real-time information of power outage and economic loss estimation accessible and available across the web would be valuable and important for decision makers in smart cities and smart energy utility. Objective: This paper presents a web-based system that is capable of creating real-time WMS. Our system enables geo-enabled applications (such as web mapping, mobile GIS app, operations dashboard) to access, query, and display a web map of real-time outage status and economic loss information associated with outages in the county scale. Method: Our method is based on the Internet of Things (IoT), web services, GIS web services, web mapping, and web GIS (Geographic Information Systems). To implement our system, we used esri ArcGIS for Server, SQL Server Spatial, Amazon Web Services, and C#.NET. The system architecture consists of autonomous computer program, spatial database, GIS Server, cloud computing platform, a WMS, web feature service (WFS). Our insight is in real-time by continuously 1) connecting to web sensors and collecting outage data, 2) connecting to web services for calculating economics loss associated with outages, 4) manipulating (modify, insert, delete) our spatial database over the Internet, 4) publishing a real-time WMS. Result: The system implementation resulted in a back-end server that includes /serves a real-time WMS. A data record includes: name of county, name of state that contains this county, total number of costumers located within the county, total number of costumers without electricity who are located into the county, and total economic losses (modeled as total jobs loss, total GDP loss, and total cost in $) caused by outages for the county. Findings: Real-time WMS created by our system can be used by applications to display and query a web map of electric outage status and their macroeconomic loss in real-time. They provide a decision support tool for disaster emergency management in the energy sector by aiding in prioritization of restoration operations and recovery phase in electric utilities in order to reduce the economic impact of outages. Our system provides an important platform for smart cities, real-time GIS, Internet on Things, map-based crowdsourcing applications, real-time intelligent systems, and for real-time monitoring and analytical applications.