Wisconsin Public Service Corporation Geofacilities Information System

There is a great deal of interest in geofacilities information systems (GIS's) among utilities and state and local governments since the early 1980s. GIS's are corporate data bases that maintain virtually all of a company's installed plant (facility) assets within the framework of a geographic X‐Y grid‐coordinate system. Wisconsin Public Service Corporation (WPSC) has developed a GIS to maintain both gas and electric facility information. In addition, WPSC's GIS is designed to maintain facility connectivity relationships for network modeling and graphics information for mapping. Since the GIS is X‐Y‐coordinate‐based, three key issues central to the base map and X‐Y‐coordinate grid selection were identified and addressed very early in the GIS design. Those three issues are: Base‐map availability/cost, base‐map accuracy, and grid X‐Y‐coordinate selection. The payback for any GIS is through the use of applications (practical uses of the GIS information). Several electric applications are briefly discussed to demonstrate the usefulness of a GIS.