Case Study: PJM Interconnection achieves real-time dispatcher situational awareness with OSIsoft PI System

Improving Grid Operator Situational Awareness by Combining Space and Time

PJM Interconnection, one of the largest U.S. transmission operators serving 61 million people and managing a 163,000 MW peak load across 13 states and DC, needed better situational awareness for dispatchers. Their legacy GIS and extensive PI System (with roughly 1.6 million PI Tags) held the necessary data, but it wasn’t integrated with real-time weather and operational information, making it hard to quickly see line statuses, flows and outage conditions during reliability events.

PJM built the Dispatch Interactive Map Application (DIMA) using Esri ArcGIS and the OSIsoft PI System (including the PI Integrator for Esri ArcGIS) to overlay real-time radar, weather warnings, transmission lines, zone shading and color-coded line statuses. The result: dispatchers gain a unified, easy-to-use view of grid conditions for faster monitoring and response, with plans to expand the tool to include additional SCADA and generation data.

PJM Interconnection

Ed Kovler

Lead Solutions Architect