State of Risk Prediction for Management and Mitigation of Vegetation and Weather Caused Outages in Distribution Networks

The paper proposes a novel approach for the outage State of Risk (SoR) assessment caused by weather and vegetation in the distribution grid. Machine Learning prediction algorithm is used in conjunction with GIS application for mapping the SoR for the entire network. The proposed optimization approach leads to the specification of the mitigation strategies that utility staff and customers can coordinate to minimize the impact of outages. The resulting SoR assessment enables the implementation of an innovative decision-making solution for utility operators, represented in the form of risk maps. Additionally, utilizing the SoR assessments, a Customer Notification System (CNS) is introduced to enhance customer awareness and facilitate the adoption of mitigation measures. This holistic approach shifts outage management from a reactive process to a proactive initiative, promoting grid resilience and reliability through planned outage mitigation.