New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has deployed a new software solution that anticipates power supply issues with the aim of reducing delays and improving quality of life to the city’s 5.7 million daily subway riders.

The support tool for outage restoration management (Storm) proactively analyses data from smart meters to detect and address problems in the electric grid before they become outages. In addition, it will also detect when power has actually failed.

In partnership with city utility Con Edison, GridBright, a systems integrator specialising in outage management, led the system integration team to enhance Storm to use data from more than 2,000 smart meter locations on the city’s subway system.

As part of this effort, Con Edison developed a mechanism to provide the MTA “unparalleled visibility” into its own electric service status. Con Edison also created new communications protocols to ensure that Con Edison operators and subway system operators have consistent real-time information regarding the power supply to the subway.

“The Storm tool has already proved itself by proactively identifying subway supply issues before they caused service interruptions,” said Thomas Langlois, project manager at Con Edison.

“GridBright’s assistance in developing this tool on time and on budget is helping Con Edison deliver value to our customers and all users of the subway.”

The Storm tool is the first phase of the multi-year outage management system (OMS) integration project that started with a contract awarded to GridBright in June 2017.

The GridBright team is part of the ongoing multi-year deployment of smart meters under Con Edison’s advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) project.

The next phase of the GridBright efforts is integration between OMS and AMI that will provide additional critical benefits from AMI project.

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