The DIS department develops a CAD sytem that models large power utilities' electrical network distribution systems. The CAD system manages massive databases of substations, transformers, and customers for large power generators such as CP&L and Excelon. The software can perform dynamic network updates; tracing of electrical connectivity; heuristic outage detection; etc. It is designed to handle simultaneous interaction by dozens of operators; during storm situations, the system must handle data input from thousands of customer calls as well.

Components include:

• Client
  Electrical network map written in MFC and native C++
  List-driven GUI to model business rules written in Java

• Server
  Unix server modules
  Modular server design includes separate components that handle different classes of messages
  SmartSockets client/server middleware provides a publish/subscribe model

• Database
  Three schemas stored in an Oracle database (for electrical network data, power outage data, and admin data)

I am the lead developer for the map client. Functionality that I designed and implemented in whole or extended from the beta-level product of 2000 includes:

• Performance enhancements
  Enhanced the performance of the existing beta-level product to best-in-class levels. The customer is a huge power utility with a network comprised of 4 million nodes and lines. The network includes millions of many types of other objects that can be operated in realtime. The entire network can be loaded at once and dynamically zoomed and panned. Double-buffered bitblitted display, in-memory indexed arrays of required display data, and a cell-based object filtering mechanism for smooth operation.

• Dynamic symbology and annotations
  Symbols scale between a minimum and maximum size as the user zooms in and out. Dynamic annotations as the user zooms in and out. All symbology and annotations can be configured to declutter at given zoom levels. The result is a map that gains detail as the user zooms in and simplifies as s/he zooms out.

• Multiple view support
  Unlimited number of views of the network are available. View types: geographic, schematic, site, auto-schematic, zoom overview (bird's-eye), simulation.

  • Zoom overview
    A bird's-eye view of the map that allows zooming and panning of the corresponding main view. The bird's-eye view can be adjusted to target any area of the map. Standard CAD-style modifiers (shift-mouse to pan, ctrl-click/right-click or mousewheel to zoom, etc.); extended with Alt- to allow zoom/pan in bird's-eye view.

  • Auto-schematic
    A subset of the network can be dynamically selected, and a non-overlapping schematic layout can be automatically generated on the fly. Designed to support multiple auto-schematic algorithms. Includes special symbology to dynamically represent the status of a cluster of objects ('site').

• Custom coding for every large customer
  Every large utility has unique operating procedures. We maintain many separate code branches to manage these differences. I have a policy to ensure new functionality is made as generally useful as possible and "mainlined" to the main branch. I have submitted over xxx code submissions over the course of 5 years. Maintained a Java-based code generator that generated C++ wrapper code for database, to ease cross-branch maintenance.