Have you ever been hard at work when suddenly - power outage? When this happens, power companies begin working to locate the fault and fix the problem. However, locating the fault can take a long time. The only data they have is which houses have lost power, which gives them no information on the physical position of the fault.

My work has been to utilize smart meter data to help power companies fix faults quickly. We do this by building models of the network using smart meter data. This tells us which houses are close together. We can then inform the power company “If these houses have all lost power, it’s probably this wire that connects them all, look there first”. With these models, we can investigate additional details about the network, improving efficiency.