Outage Management Systems Real-Time Dashboard Assessment Study
Electric distribution companies are faced with increased pressure from customers, the media and regulators to provide accurate outage information that is very timely and essentially in real-time. Distribution owners/operators turn to new technology in the form of Dashboards, Business Intelligence and Outage Management Systems (OMS) to help address these demands. Under ever increasing pressure to improve reliability of electric supply, operations needs to perform restoration faster and more efficiently, driving internal demands for the detailed restoration information to be available in real-time as well. The needs of these internal operational users are typically even more detailed and complex. In addition, regulators are providing financial incentives or penalties based upon reliability goals or Key Performance Indicators (KPI)s. Management is demanding that accurate calculation of progress towards meeting these goals be provided daily or weekly rather than monthly or quarterly. This presentation covers the results of a study into the needs of existing outage management systems users and what they need in a real-time dashboard to meet these new business challenges.
Outage Management through AMR Systems Using an Intelligent Data Filter
Automatic meter reading (AMR) is the remote collection of consumption data from customers' utility meters over telecommunication, radio, power line, and other links. Electric utilities are exploring the usage of AMR data for outage management for distribution systems. Signals from automated meters can provide additional information in the outage detection and determination processes as well as restoration phases of outage management. Due to its low quality, however, AMR outage data cannot be fed directly into outage management systems. This paper details the development of an intelligent information filter for automated metering systems. The filter prevents false outage notifications in addition to improving the quality of outage data. The nature of wireless communication in the AMR system introduces uncertainty issues in the query process. This uncertainty has been modeled using probabilistic and fuzzy engineering techniques. The filter has also been tested using historical outage data.
Selection and implementation of an outage management system
An effective outage management system (OMS) does not stand alone. There is more to an OMS than its underlying analytical techniques. The author offers his vendor-neutral views on the effectiveness of OMS technology through his experience in planning and implementing four different outage management systems for scores of utilities worldwide. There are four key success factors in the selection and implementation of an OMS: data, system, usability, and business process.