National Grid plans £3.5m data analytics project

Utilities company the National Grid is looking to partner with one or more vendors to provide it with advanced analytics and visualisation tools that will allow it to make better use of its current enterprise systems.

An online tender outlines the five-year contract that is set to be worth up to £3.5m.

The document highlights that the National Grid is facing "significant challenges" in the form of ageing assets and increasing investment volumes, which the business aims to tackle through better strategic asset management (SAM), part of which includes data analytics and visualisation.

It hopes that better SAM will deliver "integrated infrastructure, data storage, analysis and reporting tools".

The chosen supplier will have to provide National Grid with a single point of access to data from multiple applications, dashboard displays, visualisation of data within a geospatial context and integration with existing core capabilities, such as network control systems.

The solution will also include a "data historian", which is a repository to acquire, compress and store high performance time-series data and historical information.

The National Grid requires that any deployed solution must comply with the IEC61970 common information model, which is a series of standards that deals with energy management systems and provides guidelines to facilitate the integration of applications and exchange of information in a control centre environment.

Interested parties have until 13 February to contact National Grid and participate in the tender.