Application of AMR based on powerline communication in outage management system

At present power company challenge is how to quickly and effectually implement outage management, the upgrade of both metering technology and communication system makes the development of automated meter reading (AMR) systems possible. Signals from automated meters can provide extra information for outage detection and decision processing as well as restoration phases of outage management. In this paper an algorithm efficiently using available information from distribution network supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and AMR systems based on power line communication (PLC) to locate outage sources is presented. Using the polling characteristic of AMR based on PLC can identify the scope of outage, by polling these meters adjacent to the meter with a trouble call, the customers affected by outage can be identified; by upstream tracing the connectivity of trouble calls to find a common point, outage locations can be identified. Using AMR in outage management system (OMS) can bring enormous profits to power industry, it reduces electric utility's cost, shortens outage duration and improves consumer's satisfaction.