What is EDSA’s Paladin software?

The Paladin family of software products is used for the design, simulation, and on-line assessment of complex electrical power infrastructure, used in mission-critical environments.  These environments include computer data centers, network operations centers, transportation networks, power plants, energy grids, oil platforms, and other facilities where electrical power problems could have costly, even catastrophic consequences.  To date, Paladin products have been used by thousands of companies to protect more than $100 billion in customer facilities.

Who uses EDSA products and services?

EDSA’s customers are organizations – both corporate and governmental – for whom failsafe electrical power is crucial to their operations. For security and national security reasons, EDSA does not typically disclose the identity or operational details of our customers’ installations. But to illustrate the magnitude of solution we can provide, one corporate customer in the financial services industry handles $7.6 million per second in transactions through its data center, protected by EDSA technology; likewise, a governmental customer uses EDSA technology to ensure the travel safety of 733 million passengers. Neither has experienced electrical power problems since deploying EDSA software.

Most of our customers work on dramatically smaller scales than the two mentioned above.  However, the common denominators for all of our customers are that 1) they cannot tolerate disruptions in their operations; 2) their operations are sufficiently complex that specialized human expertise – included encoded expertise – is necessary to manage them; and 3) they focus more on preempting problems than recovering from them.

What is the difference between Paladin DesignBase and Paladin Live?

• Paladin DesignBase is a power systems modeling and simulation CAD system; it includes the DesignBase modeler and 50 optional solutions modules for optimizing power systems performance (e.g. voltage stability, power flow, reliability) and alleviating potential problems (e.g., short circuit, arc flash, EMI, etc.) in the design stage.  Using Paladin DesignBase, users are able to model, analyze, and refine power system designs to the point that are theoretically failsafe prior to their being deployed in an operational environment.

• Paladin Live is an on-line diagnostics and preventative maintenance platform that takes the DesignBase model on-line, and compares it to live operating specifications from the facility.  Using the specifications for every component within the design – and comparing them with specifications from the corresponding component in the live facility – Paladin Live is able to identify and isolate potential problems the millisecond they become viable threats. It then formulates to necessary corrective actions, and advises the operator on how to alleviate the problem.

What is “EDSA Technical 2005?”

Prior to the introduction of Paladin Live and the creation of the Paladin brand of products, this was the brand name used for CAD software products now marketed under the Paladin DesignBase brand.  If you are an EDSA Technical 2005 user, software updates will be under co-branded under both the Paladin DesignBase and EDSA Technical names as we transition to the new brand name.

How do EDSA products compare to competitors?

Products within the electrical power systems category are constantly being enhanced, but generally speaking:

• Paladin DesignBase
• Our new version has three times the features and functions of other packages
• Unprecedented ease-of-use and modeling productivity
• The only platform to support multiple concurrent users
• Master Model” architecture integrates 40 engineering modules
• The only platform extendable to protect live, on-line operations

• Paladin Live
• No other company offers an on-line power systems diagnostics solution

What is "Power Analytics?"

Power Analytics is the term used to describe the mathematical calculations that are used to accurately predict when and where an electrical power problem has the potential to occur.  These calculations – and, more importantly, their results – provide unprecedented insight into the innermost workings of electrical power infrastructure.

A good corollary is "Business Analytics." In the financial world, Business Analytics are complex mathematical algorithms used to calculate borrower's real-time reliability, credit worthiness, FICO Score, etc. based upon their changing, personal financial conditions. Changes in employment, assuming new debt, major purchases, etc. all have an immediate, real-time impact on your credit and your FICO score: after you make a major purchase on your credit card and approach your credit limit, Business Analytics systems at your bank observe that you’re becoming a higher credit risk… and your available credit immediately drops accordingly.

The resilience of electrical power infrastructure is constantly changing, too.  Not only due to predictable factors like aging of facilities and deterioration of equipment, but because of unexpected factors like equipment changes, technology upgrades, changes in maintenance procedures, loss of utility power, etc. By constantly diagnosing real-time factors like voltage, load, capacity, and power factor – and comparing it with fluctuations in equipment specifications, or even individual components (circuit breakers, power cables, etc.) – Paladin is able to provide highly accurate predictions about when and where power problems have the potential to emerge.

I read about EDSA in Wired magazine; do your products use “artificial intelligence?”

EDSA’s management team goes back to the early days of AI and expert systems, dating back 20 years; in that time, artificial intelligence (AI) has become a term that few people, even the experts, often agree on.  That said, EDSA’s products allow power systems engineers to encode their expertise into a working software application capable of “probing” a facility for prospective problems, diagnosing operating conditions it encounters, and then either 1) correcting the problem, or 2) informing a human operator about the problem and instructing them how to safely solve it.  To many people, this sounds like AI.

However, very soon, EDSA’s products will go to the next level of machine intelligence, by virtue of work we are doing with our partner, Numenta.  Founded by knowledge systems luminary Jeff Hawkins, Numenta and EDSA have recently been featured in publications like Wired and Business 2.0, for their efforts to embed Numenta’s hierarchical temporal memory system (HTM) – patterned after the human neocortex – into EDSA products.  It is our goal is to create Power Analytics systems that demonstrate experiential learning based upon aggregated knowledge… meaning that they continuously self-adapt to changing power systems infrastructure, and automatically effect whatever maintenance or repairs are required to optimize system performance.

What industries need mission-critical power systems?

Our products are used in a very wide range of mission-critical applications and industries. In general, these are in the following areas:

• Data centers and network operations centers
• Government and military
• Petrochemical facilities
• Manufacturing centers
• Semiconductors fabs
• Process control plants
• Public venues, like stadiums, municipal buildings, hotels, casinos
• Power and energy, including nuclear power facilities

What is EDSA's role in the nuclear power industry?

EDSA has a very long and very successful history serving the nuclear power industry, with more than 70 nuclear power facilities among its customers.  The most recent of these is Canada's largest nuclear generating facility, which switched to EDSA in 2006 after experiencing extensive technical shortcomings with a competitor's software.

EDSA's products meet the safety standards established by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, NUPIC, and most other standards bodies worldwide.  EDSA is also a member of the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition (CASenergy.org), created by Greenpeace founder Dr. Patrick Moore and EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman.

Do EDSA’s products have any environmental benefits?

Absolutely they do. Just as keeping your automobile tuned-up, while practicing good driving habits, can increase your fuel-efficiency and reduce emissions, large energy-consuming facilities can do a lot to improve their energy efficiency. But first they have to know how much energy they are consuming, where the consumption is taking place, and what measures can be taken to increase energy efficiency (e.g. data center consolidation versus higher HVAC costs caused by higher server densities.)