Asset health index - driving asset maintenance strategy for electric utilities - Cascade Foresight

The asset health index is critical for your electric grid asset maintenance strategy. Cascade Foresight software enables utilities to proactively assess the health and risk of critical electric grid assets and perform transformer preventive maintenance.

Asset health index software for electric utilities

An asset health index (AHI) is an asset score that outlines the asset condition and likely asset performance based on parameters such as condition risk, using predictive analytics. The index allows electric utilities to compare asset health and is used as a basis for maintenance and replacement strategies. The asset health index indicates whether assets, or groups of assets (for example a substation), are nearing the end of their lifecycle and is used to assess time to act. Asset health index software integrate data from a multitude of sources as the basis of predictive analytics, including inspection and diagnostics information that cover condition and degradation.

Asset maintenance strategy with Cascade Foresight

Cascade Foresight is a purpose-built modelling and analytical software application designed to assess the health and risk of electric grid assets and tailored for ISO 55001 compliance. The asset health indexing solution employs the expertise of DNV engineers and refined statistical analysis to reliably predict the remaining of life of transformers, switchgear, power cables, overhead lines and virtually any other asset type in the electric grid.

Cascade Foresight’s asset health and risk model can provide unbiased and transparent decision support for asset maintenance strategy. It incorporates decades of knowledge and experience from DNV in the areas of operational performance, electric grid asset reliability, sustainability, transformer preventive maintenance and safety.

Cascade Foresight uses an asset health index to determine the remaining life of your transformers, breakers and other equipment, assess the assets’ risk to your organization, identify your top priority capital replacement targets and enable optimization of your preventive maintenance strategy.

Time to additional maintenance depends on the various data sources, e.g. from transformers, circuits, other assets and databases included in the asset health index:

• Static asset data (type, age, location of transformers, etc)
• Design parameters of electric grid assets
• Maintenance and inspection data (measurement, transformer inspections, etc.)
• Environmental data
• Failure data

Asset optimization and new challenges

Electric utilities today are facing new challenges in their asset maintenance strategy: their critical assets are often in an aging infrastructure spread across large territories, vast amounts of data must be collected and compiled, they see rising expenses for data management, an aging workforce and increased regulatory requirements. In this context, utilities are focusing on asset optimization, reducing operating budgets while ensuring a safe, sustainable and reliable grid. This depends on finding the optimal replacement or maintenance moment of all assets in the grid.

Cascade Foresight software enables support for transparent and unbiased decision-making. The asset optimization software for electric utilities is web-based and cloud-supported, with dashboards showing results in a single glance, including levels of uncertainty and failure impact. With Cascade Foresight, electric utility asset managers have time to proactively replace or maintain solutions according to asset performance management best practices for utilities. Cascade Foresight is packaged with an industry leading inventory of assessment functions designed to evaluate an extensive population of failure modes per asset type.

The asset health index software comes with proven assessment functions and provides the ability to build new functions and modify functions to adapt to varying conditions and challenging operating environments, supporting a safe, sustainable and reliable grid.