Innovative system integration for outage communication

Customers are demanding to get detailed information about ongoing faults and accurate estimates of restoration times. Typically, distribution system owner (DSO) respond to these requirements by increasing their capacity for handling trouble calls during the first few hours of storms, by improving information sharing with key customers via account managers and by improving public broadcasting via local radio stations but also by implementing phone services and e-Services-such as interactive voice response (IVR) and Internet map services-for the general public. In order to further improve outage communication, the DSO needs to adopt a subscription-based service that is accurate and expandable to all its customers. In such services, the most suitable communication channels are short message service (SMS) and email. This paper presents recent development and experiences of a distribution management system (DMS) to include required business logic and interfaces to 3rd party communication systems for implementing high-level automatic multichannel outage communication. The starting point for the development was a widely used DMS containing a powerful engine for geospatial data management and a large set of applications to streamline network operation and proven interoperability with DSO´s other business processes. Utilization of outage notifications from smart meters via automatic meter reading (AMR) systems is also included.