Severe weather is highly impactful to the electric grid, the utilities who manage it and the customers who rely on power. Severe storms can cause widespread damage to assets, creating extended outages and causing safety concerns for the public. At the same time, severe storms are becoming more frequent and more damaging with every passing year.

Fixing the extensive damage caused by a severe weather event quickly, efficiently and safely is a huge logistical challenge for utilities, particularly when coordinating field work and response. Thankfully, field mobility solutions like those provided by AspenTech can help by keeping both the field crews and the control room informed of the real-time status of the electric grid and the important work being done to repair it.

Increased Frequency of Severe Weather Requires Increased Field Coordination

According to U.S. Department of Commerce's National Oceanic Atmospheric Association (NOAA), severe weather events in the United States have increased dramatically in the past four decades. The number of billion-dollar disaster events from severe storms continues to climb each year, as illustrated by Figure 1 below.

Figure 1: Billion-Dollar Disaster Events since 1980. Source: NOAA

These mega storms, along with storms that “only” cause millions of dollars in damages, present challenges for field repair centers and the control and dispatch centers managing them. When 50% or more of a utility’s customer and asset base is impacted, there aren’t enough available resources to send a field crew to each damaged asset – work must be prioritized with crews assigned to multiple jobs over multiple days, and mutual aid crews brought in from neighboring utilities to help with the effort.

As the amount of work grows, the complexity of managing the work on the damaged grid grows exponentially. All this field work must be safely coordinated – crews must understand the state of the grid they’re going out to repair, receive accurate directions for their next work ticket and understand which other crews are working in the area. In addition, dispatchers responsible for this coordination must understand the state of the field – where their crews are, where the crews being managed by other dispatch resources are and the status of damage assessment and repair efforts. Communication between the field and the dispatch centers is critical for efficiency and safety.

Traditional Field Communications Break Down in a Severe Weather Event

Traditional radio-based communications do not scale well enough to manage the coordination required for the high-volume work described below. Altogether, these challenges can exacerbate field coordination challenges, delay restoration for end customers, and increase the cost and impact of the severe weather event:

   Communication bottlenecks prevent work going out

• With a radio, each assignment of work must be relayed verbally from a dispatcher to a field crew. This manual process causes delays in communication when multiple crews need updates from a dispatcher at once – a common scenario in a high activity event.

   Work updates are delayed getting into OMS tracking system

• A utility’s Outage Management System (OMS) is the source of truth for grid status, including any outages or hazardous situations that are currently affecting it and the utility's customer base. It is critical that the OMS is properly updated as restoration efforts progress to ensure that the current picture is indeed current, for both internal stakeholders and end customers.
• With traditional radio-based communications, as field workers fix damage and restore customers, they must radio updates back to a dispatcher. That dispatcher then takes the verbal updates and translates them into manual entry into an OMS, updates the network model accordingly, closes the job and marks it as restored.
• However, dispatchers again can only talk to one crew at a time on the radio, which often means they won’t be available to immediately update the OMS. Verbal communication can also lead to errors, and these errors combined with bottleneck-caused delays means that updating the source network model will be delayed.

   Static maps do not reflect current conditions

• Field workers often rely on static printed maps to understand the network layout, especially mutual aid workers who are not familiar with the grid they are working on.
• Those static maps do not reflect critical information relating to the restoration effort and worker safety – any back feeds or abnormal switching, the location of nearby workers, and the location and types of assessed damage cannot update in real time – meaning an understanding of current conditions is only possible at the start of a shift with a paper packet, or not at all.

AspenTech OSI Compass^™ – A Modern OT Mobility Solution

Mobility platforms such as AspenTech OSI Compass can help solve these challenges, improve field and control room efficiency and safety, and improve restoration times and reporting to end customers.

   Efficient and secure electronic work assignments

• AspenTech OSI Compass allows both utility field crews and mutual aid crews to receive work assignments electronically, cutting out the need for the initial radio conversation and reducing transcription errors.
• As a dispatcher assigns work to a crew, multiple tickets can be received at once containing key information such as priority, circuit, address, assessed damage and hazard situations all clearly displayed to the field worker.

   Repair updates and damage assessment can quickly update key stakeholders and customers

• AspenTech OSI Compass is tightly integrated with the AspenTech OSI OMS, which allows any repair efforts from crews to be quickly reflected in the control room OMS without a need for a custom integration or verbal radio updates.
• Through their mobile device or field laptop, field crews can update estimated restoration times, add comments and cause information, verify an outage location, mark an outage as restored and close out their assignment without needing to connect with a dispatcher, allowing the dispatcher to focus on other critical communication tasks. This improved communication helps both the control room and end customer stay up to date on outage status.
• Damage assessment is also supported via the map, enabling field crews or storm support staff to mark specific assets as damaged, rolling up damage to the OMS and reporting systems to be further analyzed and dispatched.

   Offline capable, as-operated network map for field situational awareness

• Field crews are kept informed with the operational state of the grid thanks to a replica of the ADMS’s as-operated map available on their field devices.
• As switching occurs, the map is kept up to date with small, targeted downloads of updated map sections. Abnormal switching and back feeds, nearby hazardous conditions, assessment status and more are all available on the geographic display within AspenTech OSI Compass.
• Both the map and work management components are offline capable – the latest state of the map and the field crew’s assignments will be cached if cellular coverage is lost, with any updates from the crew getting applied.

When taken together, the capabilities of an OT mobility solution such as AspenTech OSI Compass helps smooth operations in severe weather events – reducing communication bottlenecks, improving field situational awareness and bringing both more accurate updates and faster restoration to a utility’s end customers.