OREANDA-NEWS. November 23, 2015. Continuing to improve and enhance its offerings for customers, GE’s Energy Consulting group (NYSE: GE) announced a number of upgrades to its advanced Multi-Area Production Simulation (MAPS) software program at its recent, annual MAPS and MARS User Group Meeting—which took place at the company’s Schenectady facility. The new improvements to GE’s MAPS software will enable users to model the economic operation of their power system more accurately and allow them to make well-informed decisions about their system.

“Our MAPS software is one of the fastest production simulations models in the industry, and now we’ve made it even faster,” said Devin Van Zandt, software managing director, Energy Consulting. “We’ve unveiled a new user interface for the software, Compass, streamlining the input/output process and improving overall functionality. New features, such as this user interface and several new output processing tools, all contribute to a faster, smarter software solution for our customers.”

Improvements to GE’s MAPS solution enable the software to handle computations up to 70 percent faster than before. The new Compass interface makes interactions with MAPS input/output files easier and allows for simple scenario management, live error checking, project management and enhanced visualizations. Also improving visualization capabilities, the software allows for longitude and latitude to be input and viewed via a map in the solution’s new geospatial view.

Improving the software’s speed was just one of the driving factors in the development of this latest MAPS upgrade. The upgrade also integrates many new features that improve the system’s modeling capabilities to address future challenges. The updated MAPS software now allows for modeling of distributed resources, enabling users to model demand response programs and to visualize the impact of distributed solar and energy efficiency programs on their network. This better equips users to adjust to policy changes that may occur as distributed energy resources become more prevalent. The solution also now can capture uncertainties between real-time pricing and pricing for the next day, helping customers to assess the impact between the two and make adjustments to improve the efficiency of their operations.

GE’s updated MAPS offering now features transmission line outage modeling, helping users to assess the impact that an outage—or multiple outages—may have on a contingency in an electric market. It also provides insight as to how outages may affect electricity prices.

Another new addition to GE’s MAPS solution is the inclusion of daily fuel prices in the system. By updating fuel prices daily, users can be sure that they are viewing and using the most accurate figures available when modeling their system. This enables users to accurately model fuel prices at a much higher resolution than previously possible.  

Creating customized reports is significantly easier with the introduction of snappy, the output processing Python library that Energy Consulting specifically designed for its MAPS solution. This library enables users to leverage the growing tools that come along with Python and to create visually appealing spreadsheets and charts of MAPS output data.

In addition to these improvements to its MAPS solution, GE announced the next release of its Multi Area Reliability Simulation (MARS) software. Similar to the enhancements made to GE’s MAPS technology, the improvements to its MARS platform also are focused around speed—both in execution and time spent working with the model. Enhancements made this year to GE’s MARS solution include significant simplification of some of the input data, making users more efficient when manipulating the data. Additionally, GE has made enhancements to the model’s execution speed. With these improvements, users who utilize the high-performance computing capabilities of GE’s MARS solution are able to realize speed improvements equal to 20 times that of standard desktop execution. 

About Energy Consulting

For nearly a century, GE’s Energy Consulting experts have focused on solving the electric power industry’s most pressing challenges—driving the evolution of electric power systems with greater affordability, reliability, and efficiency. Today, GE’s Energy Consulting team continues this tradition by providing innovative solutions across the entire spectrum of power generation, delivery and utilization. With our cross-company resources, Energy Consulting is able to serve a diverse global client base with a strong local presence.

About GE

GE (NYSE: GE) is the world’s Digital Industrial Company, transforming industry with software-defined machines and solutions that are connected, responsive and predictive. GE is organized around a global exchange of knowledge, the "GE Store," through which each business shares and accesses the same technology, markets, structure and intellect. Each invention further fuels innovation and application across our industrial sectors. With people, services, technology and scale, GE delivers better outcomes for customers by speaking the language of industry. www.ge.com