A database design for the med power supply network

Abstract

During the 1981-82 summer vacation, I worked for the Christchurch Municipal Electricity Department (MED) developing and implementing a vehicle information system. During this period, Chris Axford, MED Staff Planning Engineer, first presented me with the problems involved in the design of a future MED Engineering Database. The MED operates a complex electricity supply network about which it is necessary to maintain a vast quantity of technical information for operational, maintenance and planning purposes. Many small manual information systems in the forms of cards, maps, books etc. presently exist within the engineering divisions. These systems are often inaccessible and they lack co-ordination, flexibility and accuracy. A well designed centralised computer database would not suffer from these limitations. Such a system would provide for any user a common pool of accurate and up to date information accessible on a straightforward and systematic basis. Engineering studies, statistical surveys and reports that are at present very hard to obtain could be produced with relative ease. The problems and limitations of existing systems coupled with the obvious advantages of a centralised computer-based database makes a database system an obvious future requirement for the MED engineering divisions. The major database design difficulty lies in the development of a data structure to represent the network configuration. The complexity and vastness inherent in the design of the proposed database makes this design an ideal problem for an Honours Project. The major aim of this project was to achieve the initial design step towards future database implementation. Progress towards this goal was aided by the interested supervision of Chris Axford and the guidance of Dr. Cooper.