Innovative system integration for outage communication

Customers are demanding to get detailed information about ongoing faults and accurate estimates of restoration times. Typically, distribution system owner (DSO) respond to these requirements by increasing their capacity for handling trouble calls during the first few hours of storms, by improving information sharing with key customers via account managers and by improving public broadcasting via local radio stations but also by implementing phone services and e-Services-such as interactive voice response (IVR) and Internet map services-for the general public. In order to further improve outage communication, the DSO needs to adopt a subscription-based service that is accurate and expandable to all its customers. In such services, the most suitable communication channels are short message service (SMS) and email.