Efficient and Effective

MILES Better Fault Location

Project Data

Start date:

01/08/2020

End date:

10/16/2023

Budget:

£1,838,000

Summary

MILES Better Fault Location is trialling a new way of finding faults on our network, which will help us improve our industry-leading network reliability. The system enables our field staff pinpoint the location of a fault down to a few metres so they can be fixed faster.

What is the project about?

MILES (named Maintenance Intelligente de Lignes Électrique by its French Canadian manufacturer) is a system which can give a precise location of a fault on our network. It uses low voltage power quality sensors, voltage drop location algorithms and cloud computing to detect, locate and classify short and long-term faults. The system aims to provide pre-fault information to our network control centre so we can react quickly and prevent faults from happening.

This is a significant improvement over current methods, which sometimes involve manually patrolling overhead cables to find the source of a fault.

How we’re doing it

We will run data simulations and test the new system against traditional methods.

Once the technology is proven, the project will work to integrate with our existing network management software.

What we’re learning

We will measure success using the following metrics:

  1. Determine the best value of fault location system (when compared to Fault Passage Indicator (FPI) and other existing methods)
  2. Determine the value of accuracy of fault location (ie: costs of getting 10m, 100m, and 1000m accuracy on Underground and Overhead networks)
  3. Determine how to roll out the Miles system (using existing sensors and/or procuring additional sensors)
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