Moving beyond transportation: utility network management

Transportation networks and associated analytic algorithms have been extensively studied in the research domain, with numerous systems in widespread production. An equally important domain that has not been well addressed by the research community are network models used to support the utility domain (e.g., water, wastewater, stormwater, gas, electric, pipeline, and telecommunications). The utility domain places a very different set of requirements on a network model and the associated analytic operations than are found with transportation networks. Existing models (e.g., transportation or social graph focused) suffer from a number of limitations and constraints that limit the ability of utility companies from most effectively modeling their network connected infrastructure. Although many utilities have succeeded in implementing systems on top of simple graph models, the solutions have often involved either having to author considerable amounts of custom application code to go with the model (a very expensive and cumbersome proposition), or modifying the workflows in order to compensate for the graph model limitations. This paper proposes the creation of a new utility-centric graph information model to directly support the modeling of utility infrastructures. It is focused on supporting additional requirements for improved performance and scalability (through optimized data models), efficiency and productivity (using a model that supports underground, inside-plant, etc.), data quality (rule-based system which prevents bad data from being created), real-time data acquisition (support for field-based telemetry), enhanced visualization capabilities (schematic visualizations of data), and integration across a services-centric platform model (e.g., RESTful services, desktop, mobile, and web-based clients).