With an increase in extreme weather, aging assets, and growing demand, many utility companies are seeking ways to help efficiently and reliably manage distribution network outages. Schneider Electric offers a powerful solution, integrating its weather capabilities into ArcFM™ Responder outage management system, enabling utilities to easily visualize near real-time weather events overlain on network asset data. The combination allows the utility to correlate weather impacts on their assets, stage crews to better respond to weather events while ensuring their safety, and determine which sections of their system are at the greatest risk for damage.
Weather in Responder offers a geospatial view of network asset data and operations combined with real-time weather events providing:
- Reduced patrol time by correlating an outage with a real-time view of severe weather parameters such as a lightning strike on an asset, wind speeds and storm corridors.
- Intuitive graphical interface can represent outages in geographic, tabular, and dashboard views, allowing dispatchers to quickly assess damage and prioritize restoration.
- Prioritization of work and effectively deploy crews, greatly accelerating response times and reducing inefficient truck rolls.
- Accurate and detailed outage reports as well as calculating reliability indexes for selected time periods and sections of the network, which transitions into cost savings.
- Smooth integration with other systems, such as CIS, SCADA, AMI, Work Management and IVR.
- Proactively identify infrastructure weaknesses based off historical storm knowledge to identify areas for improvements.
- Customer satisfaction through minimizing the duration of weather-related outages.
With the integration of weather in ArcFM™ Responder, utilities have the opportunity to take a more proactive approach to identify infrastructure weaknesses, reduce restoration times following outages caused by storms or other weather-related failures, and, ultimately, increase customer satisfaction.
