Crowdsourcing outage reporting

Everytime I attend Distributech I come across something that simply knocks my socks off.  Alan McMorran of Open Grid Systems has been working with Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks (SSEN) and Electricity North West (ENW) on a "Grid Reporter" application that crowdsources information from users with smart phones about outages. 

 

When someone encounters a line down, no power, or damaged equipment situation, they can report the problem from a smart phone with a minimum of hassle - no logging in or entering a location or address.  The application uses the GPS on the smart phone to determine location.  It allows the person reporting the problem to take a picture.  It is able to record which direction (heading) the phone was directed when the picture was taken. 

On the server side the application takes the location and heading and does a geospatial lookup to identify nearby candidates for the specific piece or pieces of equipment the user has identified.  If the user's phone is on a wireless network, it will even suggest which facilities may be the problem and request clarification from the user.  Based on the information provided by the user and the user's smart phone, the application generates an outage report with the details including the specific CIM data element needed by the utility's outage folks to respond.  The server-side requires less than 100 milliseconds of processing to respond to the user.

The server side application resides in the cloud and is scalable so that if this is a storm situation and many calls are being fielded, it can rapidly scale up the necessary computing resources.

 

Another feature is that it is able to push outage status messages to the users reporting problem so that they are kept aware of any danger and progress in resolving the problem. 

 

This strikes me as a way to dramatically improve the collection of outage information by broadening the user base of potential reporters at very low cost.  It also enhances the customer-utility interaction and because it provides feedback it encourages customers and other users to report problems.  In the UK there is another important driver and that is because of the nature of how the electric power industry is organized.  Customers often do not know who to call when they encounter a problem, the network operator or the retailer they buy power from.  With this application they don't need to know because the application automatically connects to the right folks.

 

From an implementation point of view the server-side application assumes that it has access to a network model that uses the Common Information Model (CIM) electric power distribution model standard.  Any utility that has a network model that is CIM-compliant should be able to integrate the application without a great deal of difficulty.