A better GIS leads to a better DMS

With more and more utilities working towards deployment of new Distribution Management Systems (DMS), data availability and reliability have become an imminent requirement for their success. A DMS is only as good as the data that is fed into it, and defective data can lead to inaccurate calculations and produce low quality results in advanced power applications, such as load flow, fault analysis and protection coordination. Therefore, there is an ever-present requirement for a data repository that can hold the list of all devices and their respective attributes not only entirely, but also accurately. This goal can be fulfilled using a Geographic Information System (GIS) that can store not only the precise location of the devices in the system but also variety of data associated to each device. GIS is traditionally used to support Outage Management Systems (OMS), but with accurate component data, it can be easily expanded to supplement a DMS as well. The goal of this paper is to explain the steps involved in a successful integration of GIS data into DMS. These steps include data gap analysis, data capturing for unavailable or lost data, DMS-GIS interface, static and dynamic validations, and testing. Finally, DMS application results will be demonstrated for a test system with and without accurate data to demonstrate the strong dependency of DMS on GIS data.