Predicting Estimated Times of Restoration for Electrical Outages Using Longitudinal Tabular Transformers

As climate variability increases, the ability of utility providers to deliver precise Estimated Times of Restoration (ETR) during natural disasters has become increasingly critical. Accurate and timely ETRs are essential for enabling customer preparedness during extended power outages, where informed decision-making can be crucial, particularly in severe weather conditions. Nonetheless, prevailing utility practices predominantly depend on manual assessments or traditional statistical methods, which often fail to achieve the level of precision required for reliable and actionable predictions. To address these limitations, we propose a Longitudinal Tabular Transformer (LTT) model that leverages historical outage event data along with sequential updates of these events to improve the accuracy of ETR predictions. The model's performance was evaluated over 34,000 storm-related outage events from three major utility companies, collectively serving over 3 million customers over a 2-year period. Results demonstrate that the LTT model improves the Customer Satisfaction Impact (CSI) metric by an average of 19.08% (p > 0.001) compared to existing methods. Additionally, we introduce customer-informed regression metrics that align model evaluation with real-world satisfaction, ensuring the outcomes resonate with customer expectations. Furthermore, we employ interpretability techniques to analyze the temporal significance of incorporating sequential updates in modeling outage events and to identify the contributions of predictive features to a given ETR. This comprehensive approach not only improves predictive accuracy but also enhances transparency, fostering greater trust in the model's capabilities.