Customer Showcase

Tokyo Electric Power Services Co., Ltd., relies on Autodesk MapGuide, AutoCAD Map 3D, and AutoCAD Raster Design software to create user-friendly data-rich maps quickly.

"We chose Autodesk MapGuide because of its compatibility with other Autodesk products, such as AutoCAD and AutoCAD Map 3D, which have already been widely used in our company. And we had great confidence in MapGuide’s mapping capabilities."

—Nobuyuki Takahara, System Engineer, Tokyo Electric Power Services Co., Ltd.

Creating a Visual Electric Power System

The supply of electric power is a great force that moves our society. Maintaining stable generation, transmission, substation, and distribution facilities and preparing them for future needs are the most fundamental infrastructure projects affecting the power industry.

Tokyo Electric Power Services Co. developed the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s facility planning operations support system in December of 2005. The system displays the electric power grid’s sup­ply and demand trends as well as facility conditions and forecast models on a map. Utility managers expect the system to become a powerful tool to back up the facility planning needed to achieve a stable electric power supply. The utility’s project manager, Mr. Yoichiro Masuko, explains:

“This system enables us to efficiently evaluate facility planning operations by displaying regional electric power systems and facilities, operating conditions, and facility conditions, as well as past performance, on a single map. With this system, staff have access to data necessary for facility plan­ning as well as instructions on how to structure and implement future electric power system configurations. Users see an instant representation of the entire network and know where and how to begin an implementation. Although the evaluation results are no more than rough plans, I believe this system is something that can provide extensive support for the planning operations.”

Capitalizing on User-Friendly Ideas

While management considered developing this facility planning operations support system for two to three years, staff report that the base system development took only six months.

Nobuyuki Takahara, a system engineer with Tokyo Electric Power Services Co., explains: “We chose Autodesk MapGuide because of its compatibility with other Autodesk products, such as AutoCAD and AutoCAD Map 3D, which have already been widely used in our company. And, we had great confidence in MapGuide’s mapping capabilities. The team accepted the idea to create a facility planning system by using data employed in electric power facility management systems. In cooperation with the Tokyo Electric Power Company, we devoted ourselves to developing it.

“We created this system by exchanging ideas (with Tokyo Electric Power Company) on concepts of making it user-friendly. We paid special attention to interface-related innovations to improve operability.”

Flexible authoring functions that can quickly implement a variety of ideas are one of the defin­ing features of Autodesk MapGuide. The new system covered one-third of the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s managed area when it was introduced, and it plans to cover the entire area over the next three years.

Creating Maps for the Field

Tokyo Electric Power Services also started a service that prints a required number of transmission line route maps that are created by processing map data from the facility planning operations system.

Transmission line route maps are maps that show the routes of electrical transmission lines. These maps are created so that Facility Planning Division and Electrical Transmission Division from each of the power company’s offices can bring them to their work sites. However, each office simply could not afford to spend a lot of time creating and revising the drawings. And there were concerns about sharing items that contained client information or related facilities with external printers. Consequently, a division of Tokyo Electric Power Company decided to take charge of the process.

Staff report that base system development took only six months.

This group manages everything, from the creation and printing of drawings to responding to on-demand small lot orders that external printers were not able to handle.

The process involves importing the necessary map images into AutoCAD Raster Design and performing position alignments. Once that is done, electric power facility information is compiled using AutoCAD Map 3D and is laid out on the user’s desired sheet size. GIS editing is flexible with AutoCAD Map 3D, which combines CAD and GIS. The last phase is outputting the results on paper and delivering this along with DWF data. Project leader Akihiro Yada explains further:

“We offer a service to create electrical power system information using AutoCAD Map 3D and compile these layers according to the requests of the offices we serve. We confirm the actual state of the facility when tracing from the original for the purpose of quality improvement, and that is where we experience the most difficulty.”

Orders for this service have been received from more than half of the electric company’s facilities (as of December 2005). Both companies expect to continue building on Autodesk’s product lineup in the future.

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Tokyo Electric Power Services Co., Ltd. Customer Story (pdf - 1563Kb)