The Power of Combining ADMS and AMI

How Utilities Can Ensure Reliability and Compliance Using an Integrated Systems Approach 

Utilities, particularly grid operators, face an increasingly complex world. Today’s volatile climate conditions can have potentially devastating impacts on utility services and costs, making outage management more challenging and increasing the need for grid hardening. Traditional one-way power flow has given way to multidirectional, decentralized networks. Balancing new regulatory requirements with cost control only increases the need for greater control and monitoring of systems.   

For utilities seeking to address the challenges of the modern market, legacy systems and traditional controls are no longer sufficient. The rise of advanced distribution management systems (ADMS) as an integration platform offers the promise of interoperability and connectivity for problem-solving and grid optimization. Also, when combined with advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), utilities get a unified platform with real-time data and advanced analytics, to help leaders make better decisions and improve operations. This integrated systems approach transforms the operations landscape, enabling managers to achieve system reliability, performance and safety at scale.  

Keeping the Lights Only Gets More Complicated 

Ensuring an uninterrupted and reliable energy supply has never been more crucial for utilities. Extreme weather events compound these challenges. Hurricanes and tornadoes routinely cause widespread damage, devastating infrastructure across hundreds or thousands of miles. Indeed, from 2000 to 2023, 80 percent of major power outages were attributed to weather-related events, and the last decade saw twice as many weather-related outages as the previous one. This surge in extreme weather, including storms, wildfires, hurricanes, and cold snaps, has resulted in billions of dollars in restoration costs, infrastructure repairs, and lost revenue for utilities. 

In addition to serving customers, today’s grid operators must answer to state and federal regulators, who have set ambitious key performance indicators (KPIs) for reliability, efficiency, cost, and outage response. Every interruption exposes operators to regulatory pressure and even penalties for failing to meet requirements. Utilities need better tools and data to quickly understand the extent of damage, restore service, and communicate accurately with regulators and ratepayers. 

In addition, communication across an organization is a significant stress point. IT and OT teams often grapple with siloed systems that lack interoperability, resulting in slower incident response, increased manual labor and slower restoration. 

This operational complexity extends to resource allocation. Operations teams often lack granular, customer-level data, which limits their ability to optimize grid resources for both restoration and daily operational performance. The lack of data integration to perform real-time analytics \ across asset management, outage response, and customer information systems further exacerbates this complexity. 

Utilities must plan for seasonal demand and manage distributed energy resources such as electric vehicles and solar panels, all of which requires detailed insights into grid loads down to the individual customer profile. This requires using more data as a resource, which presents its own data management challenges.   

Without the right systems working together as a single digital ecosystem, utilities can quickly become overwhelmed by the massive amounts of data generated by thousands of devices and sensors. Separate platforms, disconnected systems and manual work slow things down, especially when speed and flexibility are critical. 

Disparate data, ranging from customer information to geographic and asset data, makes it challenging to achieve comprehensive, accurate, data-driven decision-making and grid management.   

What does this mean for utilities? Legacy infrastructure, traditional applications and isolated strategies no longer work. Success moving forward requires cross-functional integration where real-time data meets high-powered analytics.  

Challenges utilities face trying to increase reliability at affordable prices include: 

• Severe weather events causing significant damage and complicating restoration   
• Pressure to ensure an uninterrupted energy supply and regulatory targets   
• Communication breakdowns between operations, IT, OT, and customers   
• Lack of integration between multiple systems and applications 
• Inaccurate and antiquated data that delays response and restoration 

Unifying Operations with TRC’s Integrated ADMS Approach 

For utilities seeking to overcome these challenges, the solution involves integrating systems and leveraging real-time intelligence. And that’s where ADMS, combined with AMI, comes in.  

A properly deployed ADMS platform, amplified by AMI’s near real-time data capabilities, transforms isolated processes into a cohesive digital ecosystem. Operators can leverage AMI data, including smart meters, to effectively manage distribution systems. At its core, ADMS serves as the digital hub for the modern utility. It facilitates integration with multiple OT and IT data streams, automates grid operations, and empowers utility personnel with actionable information. When combined with AMI, it delivers near real-time insights and control at every level of the distribution grid. 

One of the primary advantages is enhanced outage management. Using data from thousands of smart meters, ADMS processes last-gasp signals —alerts sent when power loss is detected at a meter — and automatically pings devices to verify restoration. This enables automatic outage detection and incident creation, eliminating the need for manual customer reporting. Real-time data integration allows control room operators to track restoration progress and communicate it seamlessly to customer dashboards without delay.  

Operational efficiency is also significantly improved. By analyzing granular consumption data and load profiles from AMI devices, ADMS can more effectively predict, plan, and manage demand. Grid optimization becomes proactive, with ADMS distributing loads, shaving peaks and balancing circuits based on real customer usage and grid status. Restoration crews are dispatched to where they will have the greatest impact, guided by data rather than guesswork.  

The integration also enhances customer engagement. Outage communications and estimated restoration times are based on real network conditions, boosting transparency and trust. Interactive outage maps, driven by geographic information systems (GIS) and customer information systems (CIS) integrations, keep customers informed and reduce the need for manual inquiries. Utilities can communicate proactively, updating customers at every stage of an event or restoration. 

Moreover, the unification of ADMS and AMI unlocks a system-wide approach to regulatory compliance and continuous improvement. Operators now have access to both historical and real-time performance data, enabling analytics that track regulatory KPIs and customer satisfaction metrics. Management can benchmark performance, identify trends, and adjust operational strategies to improve reliability and reduce costs. 

Underpinning these core benefits and process improvements involves robust functionality that includes: 

Near-real-time Metering Data: The pairing of ADMS with AMI empowers utilities to leverage near real-time metering data, including last-gasp signals and ping responses. This provides unprecedented visibility into outage conditions and restoration actions, eliminating the need to wait for customer calls. It also fuels client-facing communication and intuitive dashboards. 

Granular Consumption and Load Profiles: AMI provides operators with individual customer consumption patterns, enabling ADMS to optimize demand management, shave peaks during high-load periods, and implement effective load balancing. This directly translates to improved efficiency, cost savings, and higher reliability metrics. 

Seamless Data Integration: The integration extends beyond metering, pulling in GIS asset locations, CIS customer data, and historical usage information to provide operations and IT staff with a single, actionable platform. This comprehensive, integrated view empowers every decision, from restoration planning to customer engagement strategies. 

Automated, Actionable Insights: ADMS, fed by detailed AMI data, automatically generates actionable insights. Staff can effectively prioritize crew activities to restore the greatest number of customers and validate restoration efforts in real-time. Crew, managers and executives work from the same data.