Many utility customers make a significant investment in putting asset information into their GIS. Frequently, network topology describing connectivity between the assets is not populated. Consequently, locating faults on the system is difficult, because a fault is calculated as a distance from a station along a line. It is important to know which structure is closest to the calculated location of the fault.
Knowing where the fault is important to dispatch crews, along with correlating the outages to other events like lightning or other weather phenomenon.