This chapter describes new and enhanced features in Oracle Utilities Network Management System Version 2.6.0.1, including:

This feature continues to be enhanced to provide updated functionality for Demand Response events. Changes that were added in this release support:

This feature allows the NMS authorized user to use new filter options available in the FLA report to prune FLA predicted locations:

This feature supports the Flex Ops user creating favorite crews during their login session and being able to filter the crew list to only show their favorites. This should enable users to more easily find the crews that they are working with during their shift. The favorite crew designation will be cleared upon logout as the Flex Ops user may be working with different crews during their next shift.

This feature supports being able to click on one or more event or crew symbols in the Viewer and have the Flex Operations Events list and/or Crews list filtered to only show the selected events/crews. If an event is selected that is part of a condensed events view, then the lead event is shown and can be expanded as usual.

When using Flex Ops on a tablet, the user can now use the camera to take photos or videos and add them to an event or damage assessment, similar to what is already supported with the Operations Mobile Application (OMA).

The Oracle Site Guard option used to help orchestrate failover from a primary NMS site to a backup NMS site (Disaster Recovery) has been replaced with an NMS internal (simplified script based) mechanism.

Integration has been added between the NMS Operations Mobile Application (OMA) and Oracle Field Service (OFS) enterprise mobile solution. An OFS user can select options to bring a running OMA application to the foreground on their same device with context such as a switching sheet to be executed or an event that needs damage assessment, or target the OMA map to specified coordinates. The user can then perform their tasks in OMA and once done, return to the OFS activity from which they launched OMA. This allows OMA and OFS to complement each other with a seamless user experience.

Several enhancements have been done to improve the OMA user experience, including more use of slide-out context menus to replace or complement rows of action icons and other improvements to common workflows. Additional effort has been done to improve the device-responsiveness of OMA to display better on different resolution of devices and changing screen orientations.

This feature adds temperature as one of the limit types supported by PF to model the behavior of a capacitor. This allows PF to determine if a capacitor is ON or OFF using weather data and the capacitor's ON/OFF temperature threshold.

This feature allows PF to have a more accurate modeling of SCADA-controlled capacitors that have a Local Voltage Control (LVC).

In case of loss of communication to SCADA or SCADA suspect data, NMS will take into consideration the last known status of the capacitor's LVC in order to determine whether to use normal or emergency limits for the state estimation of the capacitor.

Furthermore, in addition to the Local/Remote status, the LVC status would also have an impact on the capacitor bank's control authorization. If a capacitor bank is not authorized for remote control, it will not receive commands from NMS via the SCADA and it will not be part of the set of options available to VoltVAr Optimization (VVO); VVO would treat them as fixed capacitors.

This feature allows the new FLMService to multi-thread real-time FLM and forecast FLM tasks so that multiple islands can be solved simultaneously. This is a continuation of an enhancement that was part of NMS 2.6.0.0.

This feature adds the ability to aggregate individual meter details to service point transformers, where these are supplied instead of transformer data, before ingestion through the Load Profile Adapter.

This feature allows a project to configure a permissible voltage set point range for each voltage regulator and LTC (Load Tap Changer). It would ensure that the Network Optimization Tool does not recommend a voltage set point for voltage regulators or LTCs outside of the physical limit of the device.

NMS v2.6.0.1.0 provides many significant enhancements around SCADA. The main enhancements are described below.

There are three new features that add additional functionality to the alarm display:

The first feature allows users to freeze an individual alarm display to manage a set of alarms, preventing further alarms from being added to that list whilst also allowing users to manage and remove the alarms as they are processed. In addition, users will be able to freeze individual alarms, adding them to a dedicated Frozen Alarms display, ensuring they stay immediately visible to the user, who can again process them from this display.

The second feature incorporates an Alarm Shelving option. With Alarm Shelving, users are able to apply some pre-configured shelving rules to the alarm display for all users. Designed to be used during large network events, such as storms, where lower-level alarms can be shelved during the event allowing users to concentrate on the most important alarms. Shelved alarms will still be processed by the system and, when shelving is removed, all standing alarms will be returned to the main alarm displays.

The third feature allows users to acknowledge the page of visible alarms in the alarm display.

This feature allows the connection of single input bits with the SCADA Configuration to support scenarios where IED/RTU wiring is not contiguous for multi-bit inputs.

There are two new features that add additional functionality to the commissioning process.

The first feature enhances commissioning to include a dedicated alarm display where the relevant alarms can be raised and viewed when commissioning devices. These alarms will not be visible to other users and not be stored after the commissioning is completed.

The second feature adds some further checks to the commissioning tool ensuring that only points associated with devices can be commissioned, providing warnings where necessary, performing integrity scans when points are removed from Test Mode and adding support for devices or measurements that either don’t currently exist or are in the Pending Construction state.

This feature adds the ability to secure the connection between NMS and Flex SCADA and the LEC instance which performs the Front-End Processing (FEP) functionality, using secure keys.

This feature allows users to open a view onto the IED logs provided by LEC. The logs can be viewed and filtered to particular IEDs and/or FEPs. The user will also be able to save filters for future use.

This feature adds the ability to both define a template to apply to an IED when it is being imported and to specify a FEP that the imported IED should be attached to.

This feature adds the ability to force poll IEDs for their current values when running applications such as FLISR.

This feature extends the existing trend features to add more capabilities to the displayed trends. This will include:

This feature allows addressing multiple Suggested Switching gaps according to our customers. It includes:

This feature adds right-click and menu options to tabular displays in Web Workspace and Flex Operations to be able to navigate to that row’s device in the Viewer/map. This should be available in customer and call lists, switch steps, summaries, and so on. These navigation options were previously available in some tables, but it should now be configured for all tables by default.

Tabular displays now allow a Web Workspace or Flex Ops user to select and copy to the clipboard a selected single cell or column, or one or more rows (with or without column headers). This facilitates copying and pasting information into another NMS field such as a comment, or into a spreadsheet for analysis.

Previously Switching had a single Return to Nominal option as well as options to copy steps as go-backs. Now 3 options are supported:

This feature adds an option to use in the desktop Web Workspace application the same Common Network Viewer (CNV) originally developed in NMS v2.6.0.0 for Flex Operations and OMA. The previous Web Workspace Viewer will continue to be supported in 2.6.0.1 since there are a small number of functions that the Web Workspace Viewer supports that are not yet available in the Common Network Viewer. The legacy Web Workspace Viewer will be completely removed in a future service pack or release.

The Common Network Viewer improves the performance of map interactions such as panning and zooming, while also including enhanced display of conductor highlights, phases, text annotations, and other network information. Much of the Viewer configuration for Web Workspace, Flex Operations, and OMA can be managed in a single place, rather than across different files and file locations specific to each application, thus simplifying configuration and maintenance.