Growing up with a nurse for a dad, I spent a surprising amount of time around hospitals, medical people, and general medical stuff. Let’s just say dinner conversations weren’t always the most appetizing topics. In shaking out a metaphor for our earlier post, “10 Best Practices for ADMS Data Readiness”, I couldn’t help but see the digital grid, especially the Advanced Distribution Management System (ADMS) and its supporting systems, like a body—intricate, interconnected, and prone to acting up when something isn’t quite right.
Your ADMS isn’t just a platform, it’s a living, breathing organism. And if even one system starts misfiring, the whole body feels it. Let’s scrub in and explore what keeps the grid alive, what happens when parts of it start to fail, and how certain diagnoses can be remedied before disease takes root.
The Brain: ADMS Core
Medical Term:
The ADMS is the brain—the central command center. It takes in real-time data from a multitude of systems, analyzes it, and makes rapid decisions to help operators effectively manage and monitor the grid. Like any brain, it needs accurate signals and clear communication to make good decisions.
Symptoms:
Cognitive fog. Headaches. When your data is unreliable, the system hesitates or misfires, leading to bad calls made on the human end. Alarms may not align with field conditions. Small inconveniences on a light day may compound in storm conditions. Faults linger. Decisions delay. Poor inputs lead to cloudy judgment.
Prescription:
Keep the brain sharp. Prioritize high-quality, real-time data and clean integration logic. Create operational guardrails and override logic that accounts for uncertainty. Revisit and recalibrate automated components and prediction tools. Make sure data governance is preventing conflicts and enforcing consistency
The Spine: GIS
Medical Term:
GIS is the backbone of your ADMS. It spatially defines physical structure, connectivity, and layout. If it’s out of alignment, everything downstream, from switching to restoration, starts limping along.
Symptoms:
Chronic back pain. Bad models lead to incorrect connectivity, phantom devices, or broken tracing logic. Every feeder, switch, transformer, and device location are traced back to GIS. When the data is healthy, everything connects and functions smoothly. When it’s not, subtle issues can pop up in ways that can be hard to isolate and hard to ignore. Just as other parts of your body may try to compensate when the spine is experiencing issues, misalignment can put stress on the whole system. Muscles and nerves can be pushed to pick up the slack, workarounds for processes that should flow smoothly can pop up anywhere in the system, and over time, even small issues add up and compound.
Prescription:
Don’t skip the chiropractor for your health assessment. Conduct a thorough GIS assessment. Upgrade geometry, fix legacy workarounds, and ensure your GIS reflects the as-built network supported by good posture, strong Data Change Management (DCM) practices, and regular Geometric Work Design (GWD) validation to keep the foundation structurally sound. Brace up your imports and continue to improve and mature your validation checks. When issues do pop up, identify the root cause and ensure edit and design process issues aren’t spreading to other parts of the grid.
The Nerves: SCADA
Medical Term:
Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) is your nervous system. It senses what’s happening and delivers status updates to the brain, including signals from a variety of devices, both when they are operating and when they are struggling.
Symptoms:
Neuropathy. Mismatched naming, inconsistent topology, and telemetry dropouts mean the brain gets the wrong message or no message at all. If signals are delayed or contradictory, you might be feeling phantom pains or missing actual problems. Misconfigured remote terminal units (RTUs), improperly mapped points, or improper polling frequency can reduce coordination and reflexes. Missing or inconsistent data can cause blind spots and situational awareness issues which can lead to difficulty with fault identification, isolation, and restoration.
Prescription:
Align SCADA with GIS. Standardize naming and check for phase or topology mismatches. A healthy nervous system starts with signal integrity. Normalize and group telemetry. Ensure your devices are up to date and communicating properly. Treat weak signals like pinched nerves—identify them early and rehabilitate or replace as needed.
The Circulatory System: AMI & Telemetry
Medical Term:
Telemetry and Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) keep data flowing like blood through the arteries, including voltage readings, load data, and fault indicators. It reaches into places SCADA doesn’t, especially deep into the distribution grid.
Symptoms:
Hypertension. Hypertension means blood is flowing with too much pressure. Your AMI system may be providing too much noisy data with no filtering. AMI is reaching out to the very endpoints of the grid—customer meters, usage patterns, and outage indicators—beyond the devices to provide insights to SCADA. If you’re pulling more than necessary into your ADMS, the strain on the system in times when critical data takes priority can drown out those critical signals with noise.
Or, on the other side, anemia. Critical signals missing entirely. Missing meters, poor communication, and faulty devices can cause gaps in outage detection, delays in voltage anomaly recognition, or the inability to run reliable load forecasting.
If the flow is blocked or contaminated and left untreated, the whole system weakens.
Prescription:
Filter, validate, and prioritize your flows. Establish bellwether meters and line devices at key pulse points to provide fast insight into system health issues and catch problems before they escalate. Make sure the right data gets where it needs to go at the right time and leave the noise behind. Identify and correct failed endpoints. Use your AMI as a continuous feedback loop to validate switching plans, voltage optimization, and load shifts.
The Respiratory System: VVO & ONR
Medical Term:
Volt Var Optimization (VVO) and Optimal Network Reconfiguration (ONR) keep the grid breathing. They maintain voltage stability and optimal configuration to minimize losses and support overall grid health.
Symptoms:
Asthma. A system struggling from misconfigured VVO and ONR can still breathe, but movements feel restricted, less efficient, and harder to sustain. Likewise, a grid without active voltage and topology optimization might stay operational but underperforms, wasting energy or straining assets. This can manifest in the form of voltage irregularities, suboptimal feeder configurations, and excess losses. Instead of adapting to changing load, the system falls back on rigid static rules that don’t account for real-time needs. Peaks and troughs strain equipment, reactive power isn’t optimized, and distributed energy resource (DER) integrations become harder to manage. The result is a grid that is always catching up—congested, inefficient, and struggling to catch its breath. Without healthy lungs, you may still function, but you’re winded, coughing, or compensating.
Prescription:
Asthma doesn’t go away on its own and neither does inefficiencies in voltage and network configuration. ONR can act as an emergency inhaler, rerouting power quickly when things go wrong and restoring balance before conditions become critical. VVO is more like daily maintenance medications, constantly optimizing voltage profiles and reactive power flows to minimize loss and keep everything breathing easy. Keeping both tools healthy, active, and operational will keep the energy flowing in a healthy and sustainable way.
The Immune System: FLISR
Medical Term:
Fault Location, Isolation, and Service Restoration (FLISR) is your grid’s immune response. When damage occurs, it jumps into action—isolating faults, rerouting power, and restoring service. It must respond fast, accurately, and without false positives.
Symptoms:
Autoimmune disorders. An overactive immune system may attack healthy tissue or trigger severe responses to minor threats. Misconfigured logic or bad data causes overcorrections, isolations in the wrong place, or missed events. FLISR’s interpretations may choose unnecessary isolations or switching operations. Fault detection logic may be too sensitive or poorly tuned. Depending on what issues arise when FLISR goes wrong, this can result in unnecessary wear and tear on devices, customer outages from false triggers, or cascading failures when more complex logic is pulled into simple situations. In a healthy immune system, white blood cells need time to act before more aggressive interventions are triggered. Similarly, FLISR must account for pre-existing distribution automation (DA) that may be implemented and accommodated. If FLISR triggers too soon, the system risks overriding or misdiagnosing the root fault.
Prescription:
Test regularly. Simulate faults, review logic conditions including any DA accommodations, and verify outcomes. Incorporate Fault Circuit Indicators (FCIs) to intelligently communicate via the AMI network back to the ADMS. These will enhance your immunity and help FLISR’s accuracy.
Your immune system is no good if it’s attacking healthy cells. Calibrate detection thresholds against real-world events. Ensure the health of the overall grid so the immune system can pounce accurately and cleanly and minimize misfires. Like any good defense mechanism, it needs to know when to act, what to target, and how to recover.
The Muscles: Switching & Field Workflows
Medical Term:
Switching operations and field actions move the grid. These are your muscles. They open breakers, close switches, and follow through on decisions made by the brain– converting those signals into actions. They are the physical motion that responds to decisions and diagnosis.
Symptoms:
Muscle spasms. Disjointed workflows, unclear work orders, or overlapping commands lead to miscoordination and inefficiency. Spasms can happen when signals are misinterpreted or conflicting. If coordination is poor, automated systems may not fire, or field crews are left searching up or downstream on the grid for the source of the problem.
Atrophy or Fatigue. Underutilized or overworked muscles are a safety concern first and foremost. Slower outage restorations, overly complex processes, and wasted truck rolls can all show up as symptoms when it comes to communicating and utilizing the field.
Prescription:
Train and coordinate. Standardize switching practices, clarify handoffs between the control center or dispatch and the field, and make sure field and control center operations are working in harmony. To move efficiently, your muscles need accurate instructions, and your switching operations and field work is no different. Validate that your field execution reflects current GWD geometry and that DCM managed devices are correctly modeled and synched. Muscles need to be exercised and supported to stay strong.
The Digestive System: Reporting & Outputs
Medical Term:
Your system processes loads of information. Reports, dashboards, key performance indicators (KPIs). These are your nutrients; you are what you eat. The digestive system processes what you consume, breaks it down into usable nutrients, and discards the rest. Good reporting should do the same, extracting insight from raw data and discarding the noise.
Symptoms:
Indigestion. Overloaded reports, orphaned data, or misaligned metrics make it hard to extract meaningful value. If outputs are poorly digested or constipated, insights dry up and decisions starve. Indigestion happens when what you consume can’t be properly processed. This can look like disputes over numbers, re-building KPIs repeatedly when they don’t meet expectations, alarms that turn into ignored noise, or conflicts between departments. Too much data or overly complicated metrics that require manual intervention can gum up the works; poorly defined metrics may be discarding data that is necessary.
Prescription:
Design reports for action, not just audits. Prioritize what decision-makers need, and trim excess output clutter. Utilize smart alarms inside ADMS to ensure real time data ingestion is clean, prioritized, and actionable. Define clear ownership and definitions of metrics. Eat clean data that is aligned so true understanding can be gleaned. Surface abnormalities and have feedback processes in place to diagnose and treat them.
Digestive health isn’t glamorous, but it’s essential. What you learn from your grid’s activity depends on how well you process it.
The Larynx: Customer & Communication Tools
Medical Term:
Outages and updates need a voice. Customer comms and external tools are the larynx of your ADMS. They tell people what’s going on in a clear and timely way. It’s how the utility expresses status, responds to pain, and reassures the public that things are under control.
Symptoms:
Laryngitis. Poor system integration means silence during outages, bad estimated restore times, or conflicting messages. A strained voice can be caused by outdated contact information, siloed departments, or limited communication channels. Customers may be left frustrated and uninformed. Worse, it can damage trust. They may fill the silence with assumptions, rumors, or public complaints.
Prescription:
Integrate early. Make sure your ADMS can confidently speak through the channels your customers rely on with data that’s accurate and timely. Utilize GIS dashboarding and data capabilities to ground your communications geographically and shape your messaging to a single source of information that stakeholders can understand. Keep messaging consistent across all communication channels. Meet customers where they are, keep them in the loop, and find the sweet spot where they feel included and informed– not abandoned or crushed by too many updates. Regularly audit your automated communications, making sure different channels reflect consistent and timely information.
The Memory: Legacy Data & Historical Systems
Medical Term:
Historical systems are your institutional memory. They help guide decisions by capturing the patterns, exceptions, and knowledge that has shaped how your grid evolves and changes. This insight can be critical for recognizing the cumulative impact of past choices, finding efficiency opportunities, and performing post-mortem analysis on edge cases. Legacy data encodes years of defensive decision-making.
Symptoms:
PTSD. Dragging every legacy rule, exception, and customization into a new system without thinking twice will resurface problems at the most inopportune times. Too much unfiltered memory can bog you down with clutter and outdated assumptions. New events trigger old responses, even when the original cause is long gone. You see it in patches that became permanent, redundant checks that spawned from singular events that no one fully remembers, or workflows shaped by fear of failure when the last system was new.
Prescription:
Acknowledge the history, but don’t let it define your new system. Separate valuable institutional lessons from outdated reflexes. Use legacy data to understand why something was done, then decide if that reasoning still applies. Be selective. Migrate knowledge, not trauma. Archive the rest with dignity.
The Hands: The People
Medical Term:
People. Operators, engineers, and planners are the hands that keep the system alive. They interpret, act, and guide the grid through the unexpected. Hands don’t work in isolation; they respond to the nervous system and the brain, utilizing circulation and muscles. They are versatile; we use them to lift and carry, grip things, or engage in fine motor skills.
Symptoms:
Hand tremors. Lack of training, unclear roles, or limited visibility make even skilled teams drop things. They can’t deal with duplicated or mismatched instructions from different systems. Manual workarounds that pull them out of their normal workflows. Confusion or a sense of being overwhelmed when everything goes wrong at the same time. You can have the sharpest brain and fastest nerves, but if your hands don’t trust the signal or can’t act on it, execution suffers. Even the most skilled hands will fumble.
Prescription:
Unify workflows so everyone is acting from the same source of truth. Clarify roles, including clear Areas of Responsibility (AORs), so work isn’t duplicated or dropped. Listen to pain points and work to eliminate the source. Refine processes so people feel empowered, not sidelined, by system automations. Empower your people. Involve them early, train them often, and give them tools they trust.
Achieving a Clean Bill of Health
Like any living body, your digital grid is more than the sum of its parts. It needs alignment, awareness, resilience, and regular checkups. Neglect the symptoms, and you’ll feel it. But treat it like the living organism it is, and you’ll have a grid that efficiently provides enough energy to meet demand, balance renewable sources, and build an organization that thinks quickly, heals fast, and moves as one with confidence.
Contact UDC for help with your grid modernization initiatives and read about our ADMS Readiness and Consulting services.