Developing situation awareness in major disturbances of electricity supply

Abstract

Many major disturbances in the electricity supply have taken place in the last decade causing significant problems in the functioning of the modern society. In major disturbances there are multiple organizational actors like fire and rescue services, emergency response centres, police and municipalities along with distribution system operators (DSOs) and network repairers involved in the management of disturbance situations. In previous studies, lack of inter-organizational situation awareness in disturbance situations has been noticed. After the storms in Finland in 2011 it was proposed that DSOs should be obligated to co-operate with public authorities and deliver information to them in major disturbances. The paper presents a demonstration of the inter-organizational situation awareness system developed in this research and compares it with other systems. The aim of the comparison is to find similarities and differences in the systems so that the situation awareness in major disturbances of the electricity supply could be improved.