NEPLAN Manager Testimonial

NEPLAN: New England Power Planning
One Sullivan Road
P.O. Box 1310
Holyoke, MA 01041-1310

Don Bourcier, Manager, Economic & Load Forecasting, NEPLAN

NEPLAN: New England Power Planning
One Sullivan Road
P.O. Box 1310
Holyoke, MA 01041-1310
(413)535-4137

“Since the early 1980’s, the Economic and Load Forecasting section at NEPLAN has utilized Promula in both a VAX and PC environment for constructing and performing analyses of socio-economic, weather, energy consumption, and other types of databases. During this time, analysts, statisticians, economists and engineers have used this tool to write, maintain and use large and complex modeling systems and, of equal importance, explore and present data contained in those systems in a meaningful and expedient way. Today, the several Promula users on staff, (1) organize data with Promula’s database management facility, (2) write programs/models in Promula source code, (3) import and export data from other applications (e.g. FORTRAN, spreadsheets), and (4) develop and use interactive programs that allow searching, selecting and sorting across databases. Finally, in the words of a daily user of Promula< “Its multi-dimensional variables, implicit operation across pre-selected dimensions, built-in functions, and data access techniques make writing powerful and straight-forward code possible.”

Bruce Urbschat, Principal Scientist, NEPLAN

NEPLAN: New England Power Planning
One Sullivan Road
P. O. Box 1310
Holyoke, MA 01041-1310

“Over the past ten years, we have been using Promula here at NEPLAN as our primary applications development tool for developing applications in energy forecasting for the six New England states and in other related data management and data analysis areas, such as load research. Promula is an ideal development tool for data intensive applications requiring very large, n-dimensional numeric data arrays. For us, it works better than SAS on a VAX server and better than spreadsheets on the PC for our multi-dimensional modeling applications. In Promula, for example, the hourly generation data for all power stations in New England by station, hour, day, month and year for the past four years (about 110 Megabytes of data) is simply represented as a single five-dimensional variable. The display of this variable is done with a single command and its retrieval is nearly instantaneous; plus, we can do arithmetic with it using familiar, high-level matrix notation.”