Improving Disturbance Management with Combined Electricity and Mobile Network Situation Awareness System

Abstract

This paper presents a new method to improve the disturbance management of electricity networks and mobile networks with a situation awareness system that was developed in this study. The system is based on combining the disturbance information from electricity and mobile networks. Both of the networks provide useful information for disturbance management: electricity outage areas from the electricity network systems and coverage outage areas from the cellular network operators. The outage information from an electricity network is received through the Distribution Management System (DMS) service and combined with customer identification codes to find out whether mobile network base stations lack electricity. This information is combined with operational mobile network coverage areas calculated beforehand with an empirical Okumura-Hata path loss model in order to visualize coverage outage areas. A situation awareness system that combines these parts provides new disturbance management insights and shows the disturbances of both networks with one glance. Thus, the restoration plans for both networks can be sped up and critical areas can be more easily prioritized since a clear visual presentation of the situation is easy to comprehend. Therefore, this new method improves the resilience of society, especially during major disturbances.