Software workstations: one-stop shopping for utilities

To help electric utilities use their software more efficiently, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) has been integrating groups of programs related to common engineering functions (for example, system grounding) into single packages. The institute calls these packages workstations, and each workstation allows a number of interdependent tasks to be performed much more efficiently. The original programs, which evolved one at a time over the years, rely on a wide variety of databases and interfaces, so users have had to develop input data for each program, and little of their experience in learning how to run one program carries over to learning another. In addition, some of the older programs were written for large mainframe computers, which are less user friendly and less accessible than the personal computes and engineering workstations now in widespread use. The benefits of this approach, which circumvents these difficulties, are discussed, and some of the packages available are described.<>