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Real TIme BI For Industry PDF
Real TIme BI For Industry PDF
Real TIme BI For Industry PDF
4/2012 15
In today’s competitive environment with rapid innovation in smart metering and smart grids,
there is an increased need for real-time business intelligence (RTBI) in the utilities industry.
Giving the fact that this industry is an environment where decisions are time sensitive, RTBI
solutions will help utilities improve customer experiences and operational efficiencies.
The focus of this paper is on the importance of real-time business intelligence (RTBI) in the
utilities industry, outlining our vision of real-time business intelligence for this industry.
Besides the analysis in this area, the article presents as a case study the Oracle Business
Intelligence solution for utilities.
Keywords: real-time business intelligence, data latency, external real-time data cache, real-
time data warehouse, Oracle Utilities Business Intelligence
1 Introduction
Over the past years, energy
consumption has increased dramatically.
and consumption. Integrating these sources
of data in order to make real-time business
decisions will require more advanced
The rise in consumption of energy business solutions.
resources has meant increasing costs and
CO2 emissions, and the reduction of non-
renewable supplies.
In an effort to cut costs and CO2
emissions, measures are being taken to
reduce energy consumption and to use
more energy from renewable sources.
The term smart grid has been frequently
used in the last few years in order to meet
the challenges facing developed and
developing countries alike, such as the
growing demand for electric power, the
need to increase efficiency in energy Fig. 1. Smart grid [2]
conversion, delivery, consumption, the
provision of high quality power, and the To survive in this competitive world, a
integration of renewable resources for utility enterprise must have the ability to
sustainable development. [1] integrate data from numerous sources,
The smart grid will provide a large compile and filter that data and also analyze
volume of sensor and meter data that will and present the data in a clear way in order
require intelligent analytics that move to support rapid and confident decisions.
further than data management, querying True business intelligence can support, grow
and reporting. and ensure the success of the utilities
In addition to increased amounts of data, enterprise, and assist the business user in
utilities must manage an increasingly gathering and analyzing data that is critical
varied set of data from a variety of to forecast and predict demand, anticipate
sources. Sources can include real-time pricing adjustments, manage utility
data from external resources such as programs, and customers, installations,
weather and geospatial information or equipment, facilities, billing, and industry
real-time data about energy production and governmental regulations. [3]
16 Real-Time Business Intelligence for the Utilities Industry
Fig. 7. Most important BI features [17]
20 Real-Time Business Intelligence for the Utilities Industry
6. Our RTBI vision for the utilities Having all the real-time activity on the
industry external cache database, the warehouse does
This paper proposes a RTBI solution for not support any additional load, so the
the utilities industry, considering the type scalability and query problems will be
of data source. solved.
For real-time data, such as weather data, The connection between the real-time data
data about sensors and meters states, cache and data warehouse is accomplished
production and consumption data, we by scheduled and real-time updates when
propose to use an external real-time data certain conditions are met. For example,
cache. This data cache contains only the production and consumption data are
tables that are real-time, while non-real- updated hourly, while alerts based on
time date are extracted, transformed and measurable factors or alerts caused by the
loaded directly into the traditional data malfunctioning equipment need to be
warehouse. updated instantly into the data warehouse.
Using an external real-time data cache we In order to create advanced business
can eliminate performance problems analytics, with a just-in-time information
associated with the process of integrating merging solution, we can easily merge real-
real-time data into a data warehouse. time data from the external real-time data
Also, this can solve other problems like cache with the historical information from
internal inconsistency and data latency. the data warehouse.