Emergency work orders in electric distribution utilities: From business process definition to quantitative improvements

This paper proposes an approach to the emergency work order dispatch problem in electric power utilities. Given the available repair crews and their already assigned commercial orders, mathematical models based on definitions and criteria related to utilities' business processes describe the complete assignment in order to serve each pending emergency work order. One key aspect refers to the real-time constraint, what means that computational system must be able to handle a solution to the emergency work order dispatch problem with response times in the order of milliseconds or even microseconds. First business process definition is presented, followed by the emergency work order dispatch problem description. Preliminary experiments have shown how suitable can be the proposed definition when addressing the referred problem. Finally, conclusions point out the main contributions of this work.