News

Next-Generation Approach to Outage Management

October 26, 2015 by Jeff Shepard

Space-Time Insight has entered into a strategic cooperation agreement with Omnetric Group to deliver next-generation outage management solutions to utilities in North America. By working together, the two companies help utilities achieve better awareness, improved assessment and better preparedness for power outages through predictive analytics and continuous process improvement.

According to the Consortium for Electric Infrastructure to Support a Digital Society, the U.S. economy loses $104 to $164 billion per year to unplanned power outages even after utilities have implemented an outage management system (OMS) under normal operating and external conditions.

Omnetric Group, a joint venture between Siemens and Accenture, develops and delivers integrated smart grid solutions for greater grid reliability and efficiency. Its next-generation solution to outage management offers an innovative and holistic approach that seamlessly integrates evolving data sources and applications (e.g., social media mining and smart grid analytics) and analytics with core systems (traditional outage management systems such as OMS, DMS and ADMS). This integration, and the additional capabilities it makes accessible, enable utilities to leapfrog the limitations of existing operational systems.

To this integration, Space-Time Insight adds its advanced outage intelligence solution and intuitive visualizations. This additional capability enables utilities to: Identify the potential for outages ahead of time; Forecast storm impacts by analyzing weather data, network models and historical feeder performance to compute the likelihood of a specific feeder failing; Visualize current and forecasted outage impacts spatially, over time and from a network perspective; and Assess outage impacts and prioritize outage-related work based on the effect on reliability measures such as SAIDI, SAIFI, CAIDI and CAIFI.

"The stakes are high for power outages in terms of community safety, regulatory compliance, customer service and performance for shareholders," says Dileep Rudran, VP Strategic Advisory & Business Transformation Services, Omnetric Group. "We've partnered with Space-Time Insight for their industry-leading situational intelligence and visualization platform, and to deliver outage analytics and advanced outage intelligence solutions that enable utility stakeholders to realize significant operational efficiencies and cost savings."

"Consumers and regulators expect a broader perspective to proactively prevent, detect, and respond to power outages," says Rob Massoudi, Senior Vice President of Business Development at Space-Time Insight. "Together with Omnetric Group, we give consumers the next-generation outage management experience that they expect from utilities in the 21st century."