Webinar: Optimising Outage Planning for a Smarter, Greener Grid
Join us for a 'show and tell' dissemination session on our Network Innovation Allowance (NIA) project, Year-Ahead Outage Optimiser.
The session will explore how the project progressed, by developing a new optimised outage planning tool to help transmission network operators. Developed in partnership with N-SIDE, the tool is designed to automate the complex process of scheduling network outages and in trials it cut disruption times by 34% in a 12-month period.
About the Project:
The NIA project started in January 2025 with collaboration partner N-SIDE and is a direct response to the increasing volatility in outage planning caused by the large-scale integration of renewable energy sources and grid reinforcement. This project explored the use of decision support algorithms to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of planned outage management processes.
The YAhOO tool has three main features that support planners:
- Outage Planning Validation: This module acts as a critical feasibility check, automatically scanning a plan to identify violations of operational and resource constraints, such as incompatible outages or daily switching limits.
- Outage Planning Optimisation: The core engine actively resolves these problems by generating a new, fully compliant schedule based on a multi-objective function. This function allows planners to weigh priorities like maximising delivered work, maximising network availability, and minimising shifting of requests from their original dates.
- Single Request Analysis: This module provides immediate decision support when a planner needs to schedule a new, urgent request, drastically reducing the time required to process a change.