Automated Meter Reading Systems in Outage Management

An outage management system (OMS) is one of the main components of a distribution management system (DMS). This research work has focused on outage location and service restoration, which are the main functions of outage management system. An efficient outage location method could dramatically reduce the outage duration and costs. Thus, a fast and accurate outage management system would be very important. Metering technologies and communications systems have advanced to enable the development of automated meter reading (AMR) Systems. Outage management is one area where the AMR system can be very valuable. However, more information than the AMRs provide is necessary to locate an outage accurately. For this purpose an algorithm that makes efficient use information available from the distribution supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and power line communication based AMR systems to locate the more probable outage sources has been developed. The algorithm also allows to construct a tree model of a distribution network from a data input table.