Nobody likes to be left in the dark, especially during a storm. When outages occur, trees are often the culprit. BGE already invests substantial resources toward trimming and removing trees. Clay Tutaj, Principal Quantitative Engineer, Advance Data Science and Intelligence (ADSI), along with team members from Vegetation Management (VM), ADSI, and Uncrewed Aerial Systems (UAS), set out to make vegetation management more strategic and cost-effective.
Our innovation ensures we are removing trees that provide the greatest reduction in customer outages per dollar spent.
The VM team collects detailed data on trees that pose risks to equipment and system reliability – such as dead or dying trees. ADSI then uses a newly developed tool to analyze historical outage and vegetation data, assessing the likelihood that individual trees could cause future outages. For each tree, a cost-benefit score is calculated, resulting in a prioritized removal list that VM can share with contractors – improving reliability for customers without increasing budget.
That is only the beginning, according to Tutaj “As data quality improves, we anticipate leveraging UAS, or drones, to identify at-risk trees from above. Similarly satellite data, AI, and improvements to field collection data can also augment this process,” he says. The innovators also see company-wide applications: “The tools we developed can be leveraged in other areas to improve the way we work.”
BGE Innovation Team: Augustus Mahar, Principal Program Manager, VM; Chad Devine, Principal Business Analyst, UAS; Neha Dave, Senior Data Scientist, ADSI; Siddhi Patil, Data Scientist, ADSI; Nishit Vyas, Data Scientist, ADSI; and Clay Tutaj, Principal Quantitative Engineer
