CEB's New Energy and Costing System - EnCoSys

Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB), the prime electricity supplier of the country, is a government statutory body corporate established in Sri Lanka under an Act of Parliament No.17 of
1969. Its main functionalty are the development and coordination of the Generation,
supply and distribution of Electrical Energy.

Over the past years, CEB was not so successful in minimizing the energy loss in the their transmission network and hence the energy loss still remains as a considerable amount. Recently, we got to know that CEB's manual way of energy calculation is one reason for that. Due to the unefficiency of this process, the management is unable to attain actual figures of the energy losses and hence they have to work based on estimatations.

With the coordination from CEB's depeuty general manager Mr. M.G. Tillekeratne, a team of undergraduates from Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Moratuwa has developed an energy calculation and costing system (EnCoSys) for CEB in order to overcome the above stituation.

EnCoSys is a web based system designed totally according to CEB requirements. It can be considered as a re-implementation of one of their internal project, ECCS which was an attempt to develop such a system using Delphi4 with Informix as the back-end database few years back. However, with the change of CEB management ECCS had been discontinued. With the new EnCCoSys system, it enables CEB to keep track of energy transfers and associated costs between its three divisions, namely;

• Generation division
• Transmission division and
• Distribution division
  

Login Screen

Main menu

As a whole, system is intended to keep track of energy transfers between generation, transmission and distribution divisions of Ceylon Electricity Board. It provides facility to the board to accurately measure and calculate the energy transfer costs. The application is capable of performing the following basic features.

• Generation Entity Hierarchy Management
• Meter Management
• Distribution Entity Management
• IPP and Mini-Hydro Management
• Total Energy/Cost Calculation
• Report Generation
• Calculation of the Transmission loss
• Meter Reading Tracking
  

Adding new meter reading

At each station, meter readings will be fetched to the system in monthly basis.

EnCoSys Equation Builder

EnCoSys's equation builder eanbles its users to define and store energy equations for each meterpoint. During the energy/cost calculation, these equations are interprited dynamically with each meter readings for appropriate cycles, and then solved to the final figure.

Generation division - Sub Control Pannel

Central Confirmation Page

In order to introduce new technologies to CEB IT division, EnCoSys has been developed with Microsoft .NET platform. The web system uses ASP.NET 2.0 and EnCoSys core is developed with C# .NET. According to a pervious requiement of porting to Informix database server, all the database communication was done through odbc layer with generic SQL commands, so that it could be possible to port EnCoSys to any database server having associared odbc driver.

EnCoSys Messaging System
Energy Report

Further, EnCoSys has a properly designed, easily exitensible architecture though it was developed according to rapid application developement approach due to time constrains. The requirement engineering process was undergone comprehensively with hours of discussions at CEB.

The architectural release was handed over to CEB's internal development team at CEB headoffice on 2nd March. Furthermore a knowledge transfer workshop was conducted at the same place. We hope that they will continue with the system deploy EnCoSys there in the near future.

Dhanuka Senarathne, Harshana Porawagama, Isuru Senadheera, Janaka Padukka, Lahiru Samarakoon, Rajeev Prasad (EnCoSys Development Team)