Electric Blackout Prevention: Toward a Computer-Mediated Weather Alert Broadcasting Solution

Electric power consumption is dependent on weather conditions. In most of the EU countries, power distribution is often subject to failure and it is frequent for the population to suffer power blackout. Within the solutions, deployed in order to avoid or face that problem, the public notification of blackout risks for a target region and the demand for reduced consumption are both interesting alternatives. This last solution is very basic but whatever meaningful. Consequently, automatic notification of cold weather and power distribution risks appears to provide many advantages especially when the alert is associated with the decision mechanism and supported by dynamic and virtual communication channels. In this paper, we introduce a solution to broadcast weather alerts using MAS architecture associated with a Crisis Management enhanced XACML technology. This solution fosters the exploitation of a multi-layer approach required to be aligned with contextual constraints. In parallel, a decisional system allows managing the broadcasting of alert based on their utility for the population, as well as for the industry. The case study used to illustrate the feasibility of our approach exploiting weather and electric parameters and do not reflect the full constraints of any existing infrastructure in operation.