Energy Company Uses Power of Automation

NOTE: This article was written when Cinergy PSI Energy was known as PSI, or Public Service of Indiana. When the article refers to PSI, keep in mind that it is actually referring to Cinergy PSI Energy.

PSI (Public Service Indiana) Energy, Inc. in Plainfield, Indiana is a public electric power company serving 69 of 93 counties in Indiana. In 1941, several Indiana utility companies consolidated to form PSI Energy. PSI Energy uses coal, found in rich supply in southern and western areas of Indiana, to produce 98 percent of its electricity. The Engineering Construction Group for PSI Energy creates and maintains technical drawings for all of PSI Energy's power stations, substations, and Transmission and Distribution (T&D) Systems. There are currently more than 140,000 technical drawings that are on paper, some which are more than 50 years old.

More than half the work time of the Engineering Construction Group used to be spent making manual revisions to old drawings to reflect changes in equipment, power lines, or facilities. With that much time devoted to managing old drawings, PSI Energy decided that it could save time and financial resources by automating all of its current and future documents to avoid hiring additional personnel in the future.

The amount of turnaround time it takes to make revisions on a "work packet" consisting of ten drawings "has steadily decreased each month due to the capabilities of GTXRaster CAD".

The Solution

About five years ago, PSI Energy purchased AutoCAD to create new drawings but still made manual revisions to existing drawings. Earlier this year, after considering several software programs on the market that could edit old drawings in raster format and be compatible with the hardware configuration PSI Energy owned, the Engineering Construction Group chose the GTXRaster CAD Series as their raster editing and conversion solution that met all of their criteria.

PSI Energy purchased 19 copies of GTXRaster CAD 2.5 to handle minor revisions and one copy of the recently introduced GTXRaster CAD PLUS, to edit and convert drawings into vector format, which is necessary when drawings need many changes which require new entities drawn by AutoCAD. The majority of PSI Energy's revisions require only minor changes.

GTXRaster CAD 2.5 was not only compatible with PSI Energy's hardware configuration, which includes a large format Ideal/Contex Scanner, a Versatec Laser Plotter that could output vector or raster images, and twenty Sun Sparc stations networked with Ethernet, but was also chosen because it operates inside of AutoCAD and uses the same command structure. "The commands are identical to AutoCAD except that GTXRaster CAD commands have a "g" in front of them," reported Chris Arbuckle, supervisor, drafting projects for the Engineering Construction Group. He said that the Engineering Construction Group has saved dozens of hours in labor because the learning curve for GTXRaster CAD 2.5 was minimal.

"Intelligent Object Picking" (IOP) is an important feature to PSI. According to Arbuckle, some of the lines in old manual drawings are not always accurate. By picking end points of the line and implementing IOP, the line can now be manipulated as if it were an entire vector element. Its length or position can be changed to correct any inaccuracies. IOP can also be used to make changes on circles, arcs, and entire areas of a drawing "to bring a new level of accuracy to a drawing," said Arbuckle.

"gCOORDS" is yet another feature that is of great use to the Engineering Construction Group. Manual drawings are created in a specific scale to fit the size of the paper. To modify drawings in a CAD environment, the user usually has to scale the drawing several times larger. With gCOORDS, the user can work on a simulated scaled up drawing without actually scaling the drawing in the computer. The importance of this is that if the drawing is scaled up, the number of pixels increases which uses up valuable computer memory. gCOORDS adjusts the coordinate units so that the drawing remains the same size and only the unit representation has increased. "gCOORDS" fools the computer into thinking the scale has been increased without increasing the number of dots per inch," explained Arbuckle.

Since April, when PSI Energy fully implemented GTXRaster CAD 2.5, the Engineering Construction Group has scanned approximately 500 drawings on an as needed basis. The amount of turnaround time it takes to make revisions on a "work packet" consisting of ten drawings "has steadily decreased each month due to the capabilities of GTXRaster CAD," explained Arbuckle. Currently, it takes about two and a half days to edit ten drawings as opposed to three days or more to make manual revisions.

Not only has the Engineering Construction Group increased productivity, but they have achieved their goal of effectively managing drawings without having to incur a financial burden of hiring additional personnel.