Nobody likes electricity outage but it can not be avoided as it is a requirement of several grid operations (such as equipment maintenance, grid upgrade, and new customer installation etc.) It is a headache for utility companies as outage breaks business continuity, affects residence daily life and may cause millions of dollars loss.

Intelligent Distribution Outage Planner (IDOP) is an innovative power grid analytics & optimization solution designed to help utility companies to make optimal outage plans at monthly or weekly base. It utilizes large-scale data analysis and mathematical optimization technologies to address massive data analytics, power flow computation, topology analytics, multiple objectives and other complex constraints, which are typical challenges for gird operation.

IDOP helps utility companies meet business challenges by adopting several advanced analytical & optimization models and engines, including:

¨         Grid security assessment model, which is an innovative grid device association model to evaluate the potential outages to key grid devices (overload, fault, etc) to ensure grid security and reliability.

¨         Intelligent outage grouping engine. An intelligent algorithm has been developed to find optimal outage groups based on grid topology analysis and multiple rules in order to reduce the duplicated outages which as a result increases high service quality and grid reliability.

¨         Optimal load transfer model. The best load transfer plan is automatically calculated for the planned outages by considering grid topology, grid security, switch operational policies, etc.

¨         Large-scale outage planning model. An outage planning problem can be simplified into an integer programming situation with multi-objectives and multi-constraints, that can be resolved by iLog CPLEX and intelligent optimization algorithm (Tabu Search) .

Based on the models and engine described above, IDOP successfully solves the outage planning problem and it has been applied into a lot of utilizes. In the future, IDOP team has the plan to further research in unplanned outage domain to leverage the existing assets, rapid fault recovery and security risk analytics, so as to develop the advanced outage management system (AOMS).