Power-outage prediction

Using data from Hurricane Katrina and four other destructive storms, researchers from Johns Hopkins and Texas A&M universities have created a computer model that can estimate how many power outages will occur across a region as a hurricane is approaching.

The study was a collaborative effort involving Seth Guikema, an assistant professor of geography and environmental engineering at Johns Hopkins and formerly of Texas A&M; Steven Quiring, an assistant professor of geography at Texas A&M; and Seung-Ryong Han, who was Guikema’s doctoral student at Texas A&M and is now based at Korea University.

Their work, which was funded by a Gulf Coast utility company that wishes to remain anonymous, has been published in the current issue of the journal Risk Analysis.

When a hurricane is approaching, an electric power provider must decide how many repair crews to request from other utilities, a decision that may cost the provider millions of dollars. The utility also has to decide where to locate these crews within its service areas to enable fast and efficient restoration of service after the hurricane ends.