Building an asset management system for electric utilities on a component-based environment

The process of utility-wide decision-making for operation, maintenance policies or investments related to assets can be supported with the developed asset management (AM) system. Such a system consists of a set of software applications that support different AM activities throughout the utilities' departments. The applications have been designed and built as software components-easily configurable and embeddable in a component-friendly environment. This paper advocates building complex software systems from components and illustrates the benefits of this approach through a case study. Two AM applications, asset supervision and asset performance (operating and financial view, respectively), have been integrated as components in the asset management system.