Composite Equipment Feature Details
The composite equipment feature contains components of the Utility Network (UN) where each component has a containment association. Containment associations allow a dense collection of features to be represented by a single feature on a map. See the Esri page Containment Associations for more information.
This arrangement requires a user to create and manipulate the many parts of those connectivity relationships. The editing tasks can be performed using spatial editing tools that already exist, without the need of special tools to visualize and edit non-spatial electric entities and their connections. You can work with the editing templates in Esri’s GIS infrastructure to capture all the composite equipment parts, with their network relationships, in a single form to create, position, and connect external network features. Each AssetGroup AssetType combination in the feature class that is used for this purpose should belong to the E:Composite Electric Equipment network category.
Recommended Configuration
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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.
Required Configuration
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An E:Composite Electric Equipment container does not contain any features from the structure domain network.
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An E:Composite Electric Equipment container does not contain other E:Composite Electric Equipment features inside, such as nesting.
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.
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E:Composite Electric Equipment container features are used for grouping only.
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Asset types with the network category of E:Composite Electric Equipment cannot be used to represent banks in a bank unit pattern.
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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,
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.