craftworks - Software Solutions

THE THEORY

Software Solutions

At craftworks, we develop customized and reliable solutions for companies using open source and state of the art technologies. Over the last years, there is an increasing amount of data that organizations collect, produce and distribute for decision-making purposes. We understand the associated requirements and at the same time also focus on the usability of software solutions.

USE CASE

Power plant production planning

VERBUND is Austria's leading electricity company and one of the largest producers of electricity from hydropower in Europe. In order to increase the efficiency of hydropower plants, information-based planning and control of the capacity and storage management is essential. VERBUND is looking for an intuitive software solution that improves the current workflow.

Challenge

To ensure that resources are used as efficiently as possible, the power plants should follow a production plan. A plan manages how much energy should be produced by each power plant at any given time. VERBUND intends to optimize the electricity production of individual power plants according to its coordinated plan using the in-house developed optimization engine to replace the current method.

Solution

The solution is a software with both, an advanced architecture combining different data sources as well as an user-centered interface. The tool manages plans for the capacity and storage management per power plant and visualizes the input and output values. If required, the operating staff has the possibility to create plans independently and to manually correct the automatically generated input and output values.

Result

The result is an easy to use tool that saves time through automation and is less prone to errors than the previous used method. But even more important is the improvement of the power plant efficiency as the plans can now be optimized by a tool that considers power plant specific attributes like efficiency factors.

THE STORY

The process

The Kick-off meeting between the project team from VERBUND and craftworks had two main goals: On the one side to get a better understanding of the domain, the different data sources, the current set-ups and the full project scope. On the other hand, a project plan was created including milestones. The project was developed in an agile and iterative development process according to SCRUM with 2 week sprints, which were defined in joint planning meetings following the milestone plan. In order to develop a user-friendly tool that meets the requirements of the user’s needs, we have conducted a contextual inquiry directly with the users and incorporated the feedback along the development process.

“The goal is to turn data into information, and information into insight.”