IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - January/February 2020 - 61

longer depend solely on consumer complaints. The outage
information will be sent to FFA for attending to the fault
and restoration of supply.
In case of large outages where more consumers are
affected, the MDMS can be overwhelmed with last-gasp
messages. Huge message collisions in the communication
network prevent the notification from being received in the
MDMS before the capacitor or battery power is consumed.
This message collision and bandwidth limitation can block
as much as 80% of last-gasp messages. In this case, it is
expected that the ADMS would receive very few notifications. But as stated previously, the ADMS has its outage
prediction functionality, which helps to predict tripped
devices, depending on meter notifications and its network
topology logic. Therefore, even just a few meter notifications are enough to predict the affected device(s). Outage
information will become much closer to real time, which
will help reduce restoration time and significantly improve
reliability and consumer satisfaction.

ADMS Implementation Lessons Learned
Tata Power DDL is a power distribution utility that serves
approximately 1.7 million consumers in the north and northwest parts of Delhi, India. Over a span of about 16 years,
Tata Power DDL has reduced its aggregate technical and
commercial loss from 53% to less than 8%. Tata Power
DDL implemented ADMS in March 2018. The beauty of an
ADMS is its capacity for integrating with several technologies across the enterprise. At the same time, the seamless
integration of technologies can be challenging, especially in
the increasingly complex operational/IT domain of a utility.
Table 1 outlines some of the challenges and lessons learned
from the ADMS implementation.

Summary
Overall, unifying operational and information technologies
into a common platform powered by real-time analytics
will ensure more efficient and effective outage and restoration management. Reducing outages and outage durations
will improve the reliability indices System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI), Customer AIDI (CAIDI),
mean time to repair, and so forth of the organization, which
improves consumer satisfaction. This articulates the value
to be gained for the utility business at large.
The ADMS is a technological milestone that helps to
improve network reliability by reducing the impact and
duration of scheduled and unscheduled outages, increases
operational productivity by ensuring operational safety, and
enhances consumer satisfaction by updating consumers with
power outage and other necessary information in a timelier
way. For utility and customer optimization, all other technologies should work in a cohesive and integrated manner rather
than in isolated environments. The benefits of an integrated
approach to ADMS implementation include the following:
✔ Improved integration with the GIS improves network
accuracy, which ultimately results in increased operational safety and more accurate consumer information
being updated during network operations. It also improves system performance during network data exchange from the GIS.
✔ Improved integration with the ERP system helps
to reduce interface traffic between the ERP and the
ADMS. It also helps to more quickly update the power
status of affected consumer(s) in the ERP, thus reducing customer complaints.
✔ Integrated fault and outage management helps to get
outage information in the least amount of time and

Consumer
Web Portal
Customer
Care
Center

Consumer
Mobile
App

Outage
Information

Outage
Information
ADMS

CRM

FFA

(Prediction if
Calls Pertain to
Same Network)
Predicted
Outage Information

Outage Closure

IVRS

figure 5. An approach to attend fault in the case of a nonautomated device.
january/february 2020

ieee power & energy magazine

IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - January/February 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - January/February 2020