Silver Spring Networks, a provider of networking platform and solutions to utilities, announced major upgrades to its UtilityIQ Outage Detection System (ODS) software and they are supposed to help utilities enhance operational efficiency and realize greater value from the smart grid via standards-based systems integration and unique simulation tools.

The company explained that its UtilityIQ Outage Detection System software analyzes outage events to enable utilities to properly scope an outage, distinguish momentary from sustained outages, ignore outage alerts triggered by maintenance events, and track restored devices to identify nested outages. UtilityIQ ODS leverages data from the Advanced Metering system to provide historical outage logs and visual presentation of outage and restoration status along with a rich set of data interfaces for delivering this information into an existing OMS.

The new upgrades allow utilities to transfer information and actionable data obtained from the UtilityIQ system to existing outage management system and this would only help the utilities provide enhanced service reliability for customers and bring down operational costs related to outage preparedness and response.

Along with the software updates, Silver Spring is also delivering new outage simulation tools and services that allow utilities to simulate an outage of any size, from a single customer to a large feeder with thousands of homes and businesses.

Officials with Silver Spring noted that improved outage response is one of the most critical and substantive customer advantages of the smart grid. However, up until now, utilities have been unable to take full advantage of outage detection capabilities, because of the complexity of new data streams and the operational changes required by this new technology. Their outage detection software paired with advanced simulation tools enable their utility clients to more quickly realize these latent efficiencies and deliver benefits to customers.

The company added that the updated UtilityIQ Outage Detection System software and new outage simulation and testing service are both available now.