Composite Equipment Feature Details

The composite equipment feature contains components with an ArcFMUtility Network (UN) containment association for each one. The editing tasks can be performed using spatial editing tools that already exist, without need of an entirely new set of advanced domain-aware tools for visualizing and editing non-spatial electric entities and their connections to each other. The Esri’s Editing Templates tool can capture the totality of the parts and their network relationships to each other in a form that can be manipulated as a single entity for purposes of creation, positioning, and connecting to external network features.

Requirements

• ​An E:Composite Electric Equipment container does not contain any features from the structure domain network. 

• ​An E:Composite Electric Equipment container does not contain other E:Composite Electric Equipment features inside, such as nesting.

• The E:Composite Electric Equipment container features are used for grouping only.

• ​Asset types with the network category of E:Composite Electric Equipment cannot be used to represent banks in a bank unit pattern. 

• ​The UN does not allow a point feature to be directly contained by more than one other feature.

  See the Esri topic, Containment associations for more information,

Recommended Configuration

• Use a feature in either the structure boundary feature class or the assembly feature class to stand in for the higher-order composite equipment entity, and to model each component as a spatial feature with connectivity. 

​Switchgear Example

A switchgear is an example of an entity that has a fair number of parts, where each one is most naturally represented by a device feature in the UN. For some purposes, the switchgear is best represented on a map by a single symbol, while other purposes require the parts and their connections to be faithfully rendered in the database and also in the map, perhaps when zooming in close.

The E:Composite Electric feature is a good vehicle for the single-symbol version of the switchgear when zoomed out. The assembly contains a formal one-to-many relationship in the UN. The busbars, switches, fuses and other features define electrical paths through the switchgear in the electric network, and can be configured to become visible when zoomed in. The contained facilities are first class features, and their container represents all the features when looking at an overall view of the network. Switch Gears can either be represented by an ElectricAssembly or a StructureBoundary

​Composite Equipment Network Categories

​The ArcFM UN does not define any specific equipment types for composite equipment, but instead offers the E:Composite Electric Equipment network category to identify feature types in the structure boundary or the assembly feature class that groups electric network facilities into a higher-order entity, such as a switch cabinet or a substation.

Impact on ArcFM

• The practice of nesting containers around the simple electric device types poses challenges to Designer XI, Feeder Services, and ADMS.

• A containment nesting scheme in GIS like Substation => Bay => Subnetwork Controller prevents Feeder Services from being able to furnish the substation name as a property of the circuit source object that it generates for a subnetwork controller.

• It is also challenging to map nested container relationships in GIS onto appropriate corresponding entities and relationships in both ADMS and in Designer XI.