Poster
Client Context
Georgia Power (GP) is the largest electric utility provider owned and operated by the Southern Company, serving 2.4 million customers in 155 out of 159 counties in Georgia. The company aims “to build a Georgia that works for all Georgians today and for generations to come.”
Project Objective
The goal of this project is to create a proactive approach to communicating ERTs before manual assessments occur, as well as enhance the existing ERT communication process to accommodate this new approach.
Design Strategy
GP provided the team with nearly 84,000 records of outage events between 2020 and 2023, along with a subset of outage events between January and February 2024. After determining which factors had the greatest influence on outage duration, these factors were included as filters on the first deliverable, a Power BI dashboard. However, because the dashboard had shortcomings under specific circumstances, the team developed a secondary deliverable for ERT calculation: a predictive ERT simulation. Crew dispatch data and repair times were not provided for this deliverable. Instead, queueing theory was utilized to map outages based on priority of device repairs, creating a proxy for this data in the form of repair interarrival times. It was found that these interarrival times could be modeled as a lognormal distribution. With this under consideration, the team created an Excel workbook.
Deliverables
The five-page Power BI dashboard, designed for use both during live storm outages and for subsequent analysis, will enable GP to effectively communicate preliminary ERTs and address inequitable resource allocation in future outages. The team also created an Excel workbook that allows DMs to input the number of current outages for each device and receive a unique ERT. The model demonstrated high accuracy, with outages of cumulative repair times of 0-24 hours exhibiting an average error of -0.27 hours, while outages with repair times between 24-60 hours had an average error of 1.36 hours. To ensure effective communication of these preliminary ERTs, an augmented communication strategy was developed by leveraging customer satisfaction reports from J.D. Power. It was determined that 5 points of contact with the customer during outage events corresponded with a maximal customer satisfaction index (CSI) score.
Value and Impact
Overall, an approximate 5% increase in customer satisfaction can be attributed to the adoption of the team’s design solutions. While this does not correspond with a financial gain for GP, it does bolster their compliance with the Georgia Public Service Commission and empower the company to uphold its mission of helping all Georgia residents thrive.
Project Information
Student Team
Leif Andersen
Justin George
Dhivya Gunasekaran
Harshith Gutha
Nick Sedor
Serena Shirsekar
Aanjan Sikal
Gonzalo Morales
Faculty Advisor
Faculty Evaluator
