Custom Operator Reports to Ensure Environmental Compliance
Everyone struggles to comply with the assortment of environmental restraints that are the result of federal, state, local, and permit requirements. It is important to present information to your operators in an unambiguous manner that lets them know immediately if they are on target. I recently put together a little solution for a customer who was having problems. They could produce reports from their DAHS but it was cumbersome and the unit operators do not have time to login to the DAHS, select the report and set the dates, and then print it up. Furthermore the DAHS reports did not give them an adequate presentation of their progress toward the limit.
They use the GE NetDAHS software. Most people do not know it but there is a Minute Data ODBC driver that will allow you to access any of the data channels configured on the DAHS. I was able to build a web page that queries the minute data and calculates the hourly averages along with a running total of their emissions and present the status as shown in the screen shot below. As you can see it shows them how much they have emitted that day, the projected total based on their current operation and tells them whether they should be concerned.
I was also able to add a trend of their emission rate and a graph of their accumulating total compared to the emission limit. This allows the operators to quickly glance at the page and get a feel for where they stand.
If you are having problems tracking your compliance, you should evaluate the way that you report and present the data to your operators. You may be able to eliminate compliance lapses by organizing and presenting your data in real-time allowing your operators to quickly see where they stand and make more informed decisions.
From the geek standpoint I pulled a few tricks out of my sleeve to make sure that the application would run smoothly. I used ASP.NET and C# to code the web pages. I made use of the ASP.NET caching features to cache the dataset when a query is made. If another user requests the page within one minute, the cached dataset is used. This insures that no more than one request is made to the ODBC driver per minute so that the NetDAHS server will not get bogged down if a bunch of users start requesting the page all at once. It also means that once the dataset has been queried, additional requests are returned to the user much more quickly.