A framework of advanced outage pre-warning and contingency planning

This paper presents a framework of advanced outage pre-warning and contingency planning for utility companies to handle the large scale outages caused by the extreme weather conditions such as hurricanes and severe snow/ice storms, etc. Three key functions have been designed and developed for the proposed framework: first, predicting the equipment failure and the customer outage probability; second, optimally preallocating the contingency handling resources, generating the optimal work orders, and predicting the estimated restoration time; third, providing and dynamically updating the initial estimated restoration time and customer level estimated restoration time during and after the storm for the better customer awareness of service recovery. The simulation results show that the proposed framework and methodologies could effectively improve utility's capability of outage pre-warning and contingency planning.