Wednesday, October 27, 2010

GTViewer Shows Real Time Trouble Status

from Charlie Marlin, Systems Analyst at Huntsville Utilities

Huntsville Utilities provides electricity, gas, and water to Madison County, Alabama. We have implemented a GTViewer application in our Dispatch center that was used during a storm on October 26, 2010.

The application sets up a connection to a table in an Oracle database at the heart of our “Trouble System”. If a trouble call (a “ticket”) has been received but not dispatched, a red disk shows up at the address of the ticket. When the database shows that a truck has been dispatched, the disk turns yellow. Once the call is completed, the disk goes green. The disk size grows and shrinks dynamically as you zoom out or in.

At any point, you can hover the cursor over a disk and get a ToolTip with the ticket number, the truck (if one has been dispatched), and the name of the substation that feeds that address.

The GTViewer application also shows how many tickets are on the screen. (This can be useful, because when you are zoomed out, several disks may overlap, and it’s not apparent how many there are. Of course, if you hover, you see each one in a list on the ToolTip.)

Today, October 27, 2010, at 9:18 am, the GTViewer application gave this view of the Huntsville Utilities service area:





1 comment:

Larry Cosgrove said...

Charlie,

Nicely done and a great example of how this technology can be used to do produce similar results as existing and usually much more expensive applications.