I. Background
The substation operation and maintenance presents the following pain points:
1) Difficulty in real-time supervision: Routine inspections and maintenance tasks cannot be supervised in real time. Traditional methods are still adopted, which generally relies on post-event video playback to identify issues, making it cumbersome to track personnel entering the station in real time.
2) Lack of visual management: At the time of dividing operation and maintenance areas, there is no real-time visibility into on-site activities or equipment status. Current video monitoring systems lack integration with equipment data, hindering comprehensive management.
3) Challenges in event tracing: Event tracing relies solely on video playback, which is hindered by blind spots. Multiple management systems operate independently, lacking correlation analysis, which heavily depend on manual oversight by on-site or back-end personnel.
4) Inadequate safety measures: Dangerous behaviors such as boundary violations, incorrect operations, and missteps cannot trigger real-time alarms. Video monitoring is underutilized, and maintenance often relies on physical barriers, which are time-consuming to set up and pose electrical risks.
II. Solution
CloudScout utilizes the digital twin concept and focuses on the construction of the active environment safety early warning system. Through 3D visualization, CloudScout creates a precise 1:1 three-dimensional digital model of the substation’s overall structure and equipment distribution. Real-time status data is mapped to the model, accurately replicating the on-site environment and meeting diverse display requirements, which allows the real environment to be vividly presented.
This solution has the following advantages:
1) Efficient operation & maintenance, intelligent cloud inspection
The digital twin system shows real-time substation equipment status, realizing complete control over equipment conditions. O&M personnel in the command center can perform “intelligent cloud inspections”, achieving remote operation and maintenance, automatic early warning, and decision support. This significantly enhances the real-time panoramic perception of substation equipment and environmental conditions, bringing revolutionary change to the safety and operation management model of substations and truly realizing unmanned operation.
2) Fault analysis, advanced warning
This solution allows for integrated monitoring and management of various equipment in the digital twin system. It provides advanced warnings for overheating, discharge and other hazards during equipment operation, and identifies current equipment status for quick defect location. This enables proactive detection and precise handling, significantly improving emergency response efficiency and reducing repair time. Based on work order information of users, this solution can monitor work order progress in real time, track on-site maintenance scenes and record fault repair outcomes, thus providing an objective basis for analyzing the repair processes and solutions.
III. Cases