P34.001 Transmission Asset Management Analytics: Principles and Practices
Objective:
Those responsible for operating, maintaining, and replacing transmission assets, including subject matter experts, maintenance personnel, and asset managers, would benefit from an increased knowledge of the fundamental principles of asset and risk management and their application. This project aims to equip members with asset management concepts and tools to help them implement best practices, address application challenges, and stay informed about important asset management issues.
This project aims to provide:
- Implementation guidelines for developing transmission asset management programs.
- Education on applied analytics to improve transmission asset management and maintenance.
- Forums for utilities to exchange information, experiences, best practices, and lessons learned.
- Information on metrics currently being used to manage and assess transmission asset performance and effectiveness.
- Evaluations of the potential application of emerging analytical techniques, such as statistics, image analysis, large language models, and artificial intelligence to transmission asset management analytics.
Research Value:
The project plans to provide:
- Technical resources for information on overarching asset management principles and examples of processes and practices for effective and efficient implementation.
- Implementation guidance to help members effectively incorporate best practices into their asset management operations.
- Access to expert knowledge on transmission and substation asset management.
- Industry-wide asset performance metrics that can be used for benchmarking.
- Forums for knowledge sharing among members.
- Characterization of the potential applications of emerging analytical techniques for asset management.
- Knowledge to aid selection and adoption of enterprise-wide asset health platforms
- Guidance on implementing EPRI analytics in existing asset health platforms.
- Aids in workforce development and integration of new or early-career employees.
Public benefits from this R&D may include improved quality of service from a reduction in unplanned outages and costs, better utilization of capital, and improved customer satisfaction and service availability.
Planned 2025 Research
Asset Management Guide aims to develop and deliver a comprehensive reference explaining asset management principles and the specific issues associated with implementing asset and risk management in transmission utilities. Utilities can use the guide to help structure their asset management programs.
Data-Driven Asset Performance Analytics Readiness Assessment intends to develop best practice guides for building and using datasets to aid asset management decisions. The following tasks may be conducted in 2025:
-
Understand utility needs and review readily available data.
-
Identify requirements for asset analytics datasets.
-
Provide guidelines for enhanced data collection practices.
Metrics for Managing and Assessing Transmission Asset Performance plans to survey members to enumerate and better understand metrics used to manage transmission asset performance. The goal is to identify and catalog key metrics utilized to respond to evolving issues and business conditions. Additional topics may be included depending on discussions with members.
Investigation of Emerging Analytical Techniques plans to investigate how recent advances in advanced data science and statistical techniques such as machine learning and artificial intelligence could assist in transmission asset management. To achieve this, the following 2025 tasks are proposed:
-
Hold discussions with members to assess what problems and data could motivate the use of emerging analytical techniques.
-
Conduct literature review and background research to understand select techniques with the emphasis on how emerging analytical techniques can allow utilities to extract insights from non-tabular data such as text-based records, photographs, and satellite imagery. Emerging techniques in the field of natural language processing, generative artificial intelligence, time series analysis, and image analysis may be pursued.
Asset Management and Applied Analytics Workshops: EPRI plans to conduct a series of workshops to facilitate information exchange and promote industry-wide collaboration and discussion on important concepts and techniques for asset management. Workshops may be conducted in-person or via a webcast. Possible workshop topics may include:
-
Introduction to asset management.
-
Overview of core techniques in asset management, such as basic probability and statistics or survival analysis.
-
Emerging analytical techniques, such as natural language processing.
-
Analytics governance.
Anticipated Deliverables
| Deliverable | Date |
|---|---|
| Tech Report: Asset Management Guide | December 2025 |
| Tech Report / Webcast: Data-Driven Asset Performance Analytics Readiness Assessment | December 2025 |
| Tech Report: Metrics for Managing and Assessing Transmission Asset Performance. | December 2025 |
| White Paper Series: Applications of Emerging Analytical Techniques for Asset Management | December 2025 |
| Tech Transfer: Applied Asset Management and Analytics | December 2025 |
| Transmission Resource Center (Project 34.001) -Website content will be updated to include latest results from on-going research tasks, key takeaways, and how they are applied in informing overhead transmission asset management decisions. | December 2025 |
Past EPRI Work on Topic
| ProductID | Title | Description | PublishedDate |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3002026801 | Metrics for managing & assessing Transmission Asset Performance |
Catalog of industry-wide asset management practices & metrics allows transmission utilities to stay abreast of global trends to maintain or potentially improve equipment reliability &maximize reliability without incurring additional costs. | December 2023 |
| 3002028392 | Transmission Asset Management Analytics Concepts, Needs Formulation & Data Characterization |
Applied analytics training to facilitate effective interaction between data scientists and equipment subject matter experts. | December 2023 |
| 3002026883 | Generative Artificial Intelligence and its Potential Role in Transmission Asset Management Analytics | Introduces Generative Artificial Intelligence, describes a series of use cases, summarizes key challenges, and outlines EPRI’s ongoing and future R&D efforts to address the challenges and help utilities implement the technology, where beneficial, to support utility asset management objectives. Includes use cases that provide real-world examples that show how the technology practically could be applied to deliver value in the utility transmission, and substation environments. | December 2023 |