What's in the Retriever 15 Patch?

Note: Retriever is built on top of the Simulator Product Line. As a result, changes made to Simulator will affect Retriever as well. For a list of changes made to Simulator 15 see the Simulator 15 patch description. The changes listed below are of particular importance to Retriever.

The PowerWorld Retriever 15 patch addresses any problems found in Retriever 15 following its official release in June 2010. New features are also added in the patch as appropriate.

The patch was first introduced on June 25, 2010.

The Retriever patch was last updated January 25, 2012.

Click here to go to the patch download page.

New Features/Minor Improvements:

• (September 3, 2010) Added ability to define a Real-Time Monitor object that monitors the retrieved data values for violations. Monitors can look at any value and filters can be defined to describe what is a violation. In addition a delay may be specified indicating how long the violation must persist before an alarm is triggered.
• (September 3, 2010) Added the storage of Real-Time Alarms which are created by the Real-Time Monitors.
• (September 10, 2010) Added ability to load a SCADA measurements file from an Areva system and automatically create alias and subscriptions from it.
• (September 10, 2010) Modified to allow Retriever configuration files to be saved using labels.
• (March 24, 2011) Made the process of reading the DINAME file much faster when automatically creating subscriptions.
• (April 12, 2011) Cleaned up the user interace regarding reading in MEAS records from the hdbexport file, and reading in alias and alias subscription information from the Areva DI/DINAME file.
• (April 12, 2011) Added a feature with a datasource to allow specification of a "mapping table" to translate retrieved values into values useful for Retriever. For example, a mapping for branch status can be specified which designates "2 = Closed" and "1 = Open".
• (April 29, 2011) Added ability to create a datasource which only specifies the quality of a measurement. For instance you may have three datasources: (1) SCADA, (2) State Estimation, and (3) Quality codes for SCADA measurements based on the State Estimate solution
• (April 29, 2011) When multiple alias subscriptions are assigned to the same variable, added ability to ensure that the value shown is for the data source given the highest priority. Also if multiple values are avaible, then values marked with good quality are preferred.
• (April 29, 2011) Added option to highlight objects and fields on a oneline based on any alias existing with a bad quality. Thus if multiple values are available the value will always reflect the good quality, but the highlighting may be based on any measurement being non-good.
• (April 29, 2011) Added ability to specify "Questionable" quality codes for Flat Text and SQL datasources.
• (March 31, 2011) Added Nominal kV, Labels, Mapped Variable (Pretty), Area, Zone, and Substations fields for object which is mapped by an alias subscription
• (March 31, 2011) There is now a specific type of Quality for ViolateHigh and ViolateLow.
• (June 30, 2011) Line Flow Arrow objects now use the option to show the flow from the “other” side of the line if the flow is not available on a particular side of the line.
• (July 7, 2011) Added the ability to show the count of the number of subscriptions contained inside an area, substation, or zone. This count includes the subscriptions attributed to all of the objects inside each area, substation, or zone and the subscriptions attributed to the area, substation, or zone itself.
• (November 21, 2011) Modified parsing of the DI/DINAME file to support $GEN$ to signify a generator as well as $UN$.
• (November 21, 2011) Modified parsing of the DI/DINAME file to support treating field strings "MW" and "MVAR" as the appropriate mapped value.  Previously it required "P" and "Q" instead.

Bug Fixes:

• (July 16, 2010) Changing the status of a branch while in Run Mode was not working properly in Retriever.
• (September 28, 2010) Fixing bug with flow arrow size calculation when subscribing to limits.
• (October 15, 2010) Made changes so that Retriever doesn't automatically populate subscription limits with limits from the model since subscription limits override limits from the model.
• (December 28, 2010) When using alias subscriptions with integer, strings, or blank values, an error saying "Variant Casting Error" would occur. This has been fixed.
• (January 25, 2011) In Retriever, when displaying custom expression for an Area, Zone, or Substation, Retriever would not function. This has been fixed.
• (January 25, 2011) When showing the generator Mvar up/down range in Real-Time mode, Retriever was not properly using the subscribed values for generator Mvar. This has been fixed.
• (February 4, 2011) There was an error in the option to save the Retriever configuration to an aux file using labels to identify objects. Instead of using labels to identify objects in the subscription definitions, bus numbers were being used. This has been fixed.
• (February 28, 2011) Fixed error with how the Branch fields for Custom Expressions behaved while in Real-Time mode.
• (April 12, 2011) Fixing bug displaying timestamp in status bar in Retriever.
• (May 5, 2011) Fixed errors with highlighting data based on the Questionable and Bad Quality Codes.
• (May 5, 2011) Fixed errors to ensure that the multiple aliases subscribed to the same field are given priority based on the Datasource priority.
• (May 31, 2011) Improved quality highlighting to questionable and bad quality codes
• (May 31, 2011) Fixed custom expressions and calculated fields to function properly when in real time mode
• (July 14, 2011) Fixed a problem with the PI data source where data wasn't being passed to the subscriptions properly following a retrieval.
• (August 16, 2011) Fixed handling of custom expression strings when shown in real-time mode.
• (August 16, 2011) In real-time mode fixed errors in how the fields % Used, % Used From BUs, % Used To Bus, Percent MVA values, and Amp value were calculated from the retrieved MVA, MW, Mvar and Voltage measurements.
• (August 26, 2011) Fixed error in loading and storing in real time monitors from an AUX file. The choice of which custom string expression to use was not being stored to the AUX file correctly.
• (November 11, 2011) In a case which contains a large number of alias subscriptions, the deletion of objects which had associated alias subscriptions was extremely slow. This has been greatly sped up.
• (January 6, 2012) Data source priority verification was added in a previous patch, the process incorrectly fixed priorities that were already correct. This has been fixed.