Never without …
my violin !

Guillaume Tillema is an expert at the Asset Management Center of Excellence (ACE). In his spare time, he practices the violin assiduously. Whether in his work or on stage, Guillaume likes to perform and exchange with peers.

“I always say that you have to feed your head, your body and your heart,” explains Guillaume. For the head, my work is more than enough. For my body, I travel by bike and I have always practised a sport. Recently, I’ve been practicing climbing. And for the heart, in addition to my family who is obviously my pillar, the violin brings a deeper soulfulness to my life. I’ve been playing since I was 5 years old. My parents are both professional violinists, and I started learning with my mother. I play for an hour a day, well I try because with two young children, the days are very busy. But it’s just to keep the level, because for me there’s no point in playing alone. What I like is to play with other musicians and give concerts, and that together, we manage to transmit something to the public. I play in an orchestra, the Brussels Chamber Ensemble. I am also part of a string quartet, the String Theory Ensemble. I always advertise my concerts to my colleagues, because everyone is welcome!”

“In my work, too, I enjoy having interesting exchanges with peers and combining our knowledge. It’s been almost 5 years since I joined Elia, more precisely the Asset Management Center of Excellence. It is a cross-functional department within Asset Management, whose role is to define the methodological concepts for the 3 Asset Management domains: Linear Assets & Structures (LA&S), Substations and Secondary Systems.

ACE has a common view across the 3 domains and ensures consistent decisions. We also offer support to Asset Managers. My speciality is risk calculation.”

The following three aspects are taken into account when calculating the risk:

Health models. “Asset Health Indicators indicate whether an asset is in good or bad condition. I supported the design of these health models, mainly for the Substations part. The challenge was to have a common methodology with 50Hertz that could be implemented in APMO.”

Failure curves. “The objective was to be able to estimate the default rate of the different types of assets. I have developed a way to analyse the failures observed on the grid over the last 10 years – on what equipment and at what age – to be able to estimate how the failure rate changes over time. Now, we can say: ‘such asset has an x% chance of having a default per year, depending on its age’.”

The impact. “The impact of failures is expressed qualitatively, via what are called PUTM scores. Depending on the situation of an asset on the grid (are there redundancies or not at this point in the grid), a greater or lesser score is assigned to the impact of the failure of this asset.”

“Lately, I’ve been working mainly on the Quantified Risk Model (QRM) project, an IPA stream. It makes it possible to express the impact of a failure not qualitatively but quantitatively: a particular type of asset presents a risk of x MWh/year. This is very valuable information for making decisions based on reliable data, and thus knowing which projects to prioritise.

The objective is to arrive at a common method between Asset Management and Grid Development to assess the risks of Infrastructure projects. We are at the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) stage and were able to use our results for the first time in April. The next step will be industrialisation, as well as the refinement of several calculation parameters.”

“I can’t talk to you about Asset Management without mentioning APMO, our asset management platform. The health models, failure curves, and PUTM scores discussed above can be found in APMO. To perform its calculations, QRM looks for information in different places: APMO, but also PowerFactory for network simulations, Infraref, Trangis, etc. The quantified impact calculated via QRM is then fed back into APMO and can thus be visualised by asset managers. The challenge now will be to further use this input in project arbitration processes and outside of Asset Management.”

“All this may seem a little complex, but this conceptual work suits me perfectly. I love pushing my limits. I’m not a hardcore cyclist or jogger, but when colleagues suggested that I take part in a marathon or the Tour d’Elia, I trained to be able to take on these challenges. What a pleasure to participate with colleagues! Currently, I go climbing twice a week, in Petite Ile, Maniak Padoue or Arkose. I train with one goal: the ascent of the 600 meters of the Half Dome, located in Yosemite Valley.”

🎻 If you would like to hear Guillaume play, do not hesitate to contact him.