Increasing regulation and customer expectations of quality of supply and their impact on distribution network management system development

Many of the distribution management systems or outage management systems available in the market have substantial drawbacks when trying to meet regulatory pressures and increasing customer expectations regarding quality of supply. Typically the procedure of outage modelling in medium voltage network is based on offline data. Determining of affected zones due to switching changes is often supported by tracing functionality but the accuracy of results can be poor due to out-of-date electrical network connectivity model. Another common approximation is that the tracing does not dive into connectivity model of low voltage network, or if that is enabled then the model does not have dynamic switching state. Thus, outages are typically recorded on distribution substation level and the evaluation of interrupted consumption sites is based on either the normal switching state of low voltage network or even some rougher allocation methods. On this basis, it is very difficult to e.g. automate direct compensation or provide timely information for customer service about running interruptions. This paper presents recent development of a real-time distribution management system to improve network topology supervision and restoration processes with synchronized outage data generation for miscellaneous needs like outage reporting and customer service.