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IBM Knowledge Accelerator for Energy and Utilities
Last updated: Jun 21, 2024
What is the Knowledge Accelerator for Energy and Utilities

The Knowledge Accelerator for Energy and Utilities provides a comprehensive vocabulary of energy and utility industry requirements, terms and concepts, in plain business language, that can be clearly understood and communicated by both business and IT professionals.

Watch this video for a walk-through of Knowledge Accelerator for Energy and Utilities.

Video disclaimer: This video provides a visual method to learn the concepts and tasks in this documentation. Some minor steps and graphical elements in this video may differ from your Cloud Pak for Data deployment.

The energy and utilities industry is facing enormous changes due to the differences in how energy is being produced and consumed by customers. In addition to the traditional large power plants generating power onto the grid, there is distributed generation to accommodate. When considering this mix of large scale and distributed generation, co2 emissions comes into play as well as grid stability, availability of generated power, predicting load, costs of the power and lead time to bringing the power online. Customers in tandem are also changing how they consume energy, whether it is the uptake in electric vehicles and associated increased charging load at off peak hours; or a pandemic increasing the normal residential loads to all-time highs and office and retail space not consuming their normal loads. 

The energy and utilities industry has the benefit of having a heavily instrumented network that produces vast amounts of data. In addition, there are operational systems managing work, billing, and CRM that are focused on specific category areas. Typically though, all this data can be in one or more siloed systems that are rarely integrated or linked back to a network context. An energy and utilities business vocabulary, independent of any one source and with connected categories, can give a holistic view of the data to help provide information to address typical, as well as emerging and unexpected immediate, business challenges.

The Business Core Vocabulary areas that are covered in the Knowledge Accelerator for Energy and Utilities are:
  • Accounting
  • Asset
  • Common
  • Customer
  • Human resources
  • Measurement
  • Meter
  • Outage
  • Supply chain
  • System
  • Weather
  • Work
These Business Core Vocabulary areas include concept terms such as Asset and property terms of these concepts like serial number. In addition, and more importantly, these concepts are then related to other concepts in other category areas to indicate for example:
  • where that asset is deployed on the network
  • whether that asset was the cause of an outage
  • when that asset was last serviced
  • as well as real-time measurements on the asset
The terms in the vocabulary of the Knowledge Accelerator can be used to classify this data, whether in the source system itself or virtualized data. This classification of the data by these core business terms, in effect represents a catalog of data, that is now highly organized, enabling data professionals to extract further value.

The Knowledge Accelerator for Energy and Utilities also includes Business Scopes available for separate import that represent subsets of the overall Knowledge Accelerator content. For a description and a list of the main concepts see Energy and Utilities Business Scopes available for separate import.

In addition to the category areas, the Knowledge Accelerator for Energy and Utilities has a broad range of predefined Business Performance Indicators. These indicators, through the classified business vocabulary, assist the business and data professionals within the organization, in determining what parts of their data sources are required to address key reporting and analysis requirements, such as:
  • asset failure analysis
  • customer churn analysis
  • metered usage analysis
  • work order dispatching analysis
Each of these performance analysis areas comes with predefined measures and suggested dimensions of analysis, importantly all connected back to the central business vocabulary of terms and by extension, the related data sources.
Regulations, standards, and external alignments are a critical part of the energy and utility business and so the Knowledge Accelerator for Energy and Utilities includes a range of Industry Alignment Vocabularies such as:
  • CCPA
  • CIM
  • GDPR
  • Maximo
  • The Weather Company
These Industry Alignment Vocabularies provide an alternative taxonomy entry point into the centralized business vocabulary through the associated mappings.

The Knowledge Accelerator for Energy and Utilities includes sample Reference Data that, when customized as required, can be used as a basis for the creation of additional Data Classes. They cover a wide variety of values including breaker configuration, cable construction, fuel type, transformer control and many more.

Combined, this set of integrated vocabularies that are all linked back to a centralized business vocabulary, give the energy and utilities organization the business language that is needed to underpin a range of key capabilities, such as the data governance and operations, data discovery, and self-service Business Intelligence. Importantly, by using data already in the organization, it facilitates answering the questions and measuring the business of today, but also building a foundation for the questions of tomorrow.

For more information about Knowledge Accelerators, see https://www.ibm.com/cloud/knowledge-accelerators.