Rapid restoration of power to distribution customers during major storms is an essential service responsibility of electrical utilities. Automated or semiautomated systems for processing outage calls have been developed by a few major utilities. These procedures have generally been directed towards meeting the unique needs of the individual utilities and based upon in-house data availability. Regardless of need to automate, most utilities do not have the resources (time, manpower, data or finances) to develop such systems from scratch. This paper provides an overview of a six year project to develop a low cost method for automating the more important stages of the outage restoration cycle. The low cost of the resultant system was due to the extensive use of data and logic extracted from existing applications which can stand on their own economically (customer information system, primary system analysis and transformer load management). The outage restoration stages automated in this project include computerizing the answering of calls, logging calls against protective devices, determining devices out, keeping customers informed on the status of restoration, and dynamic maintenance of files to reflect switching. The system was installed at two southeastern utilities in 1988 and the anticipated benefits include lower restoration costs and better customer relations. © 1990 IEEE
