Machine Learning Model Development to Predict Power Outage Duration (POD): A Case Study for Electric Utilities

In the face of increasing climate variability and the complexities of modern power grids, managing power outages in electric utilities has emerged as a critical challenge. This paper introduces a novel predictive model employing machine learning algorithms, including decision tree (DT), random forest (RF), k-nearest neighbors (KNN), and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost). Leveraging historical sensors-based and non-sensors-based outage data from a Turkish electric utility company, the model demonstrates adaptability to diverse grid structures, considers meteorological and non-meteorological outage causes, and provides real-time feedback to customers to effectively address the problem of power outage duration. Using the XGBoost algorithm with the minimum redundancy maximum relevance (MRMR) feature selection attained 98.433% accuracy in predicting outage durations, better than the state-of-the-art methods showing 85.511% accuracy on average over various datasets, a 12.922% improvement. This paper contributes a practical solution to enhance outage management and customer communication, showcasing the potential of machine learning to transform electric utility responses and improve grid resilience and reliability.