AI Power Outage Prediction Platform: Safeguarding Community Power Supply with Machine Learning

This project is an open-source AI-driven platform maintained by manziosee (GitHub project name: AI-Power-Blackout-Predictor). It aims to combine crowdsourced reports, real-time weather data, and machine learning technologies to achieve community-level power outage risk prediction. The platform sends alerts via a self-built SMS gateway (supports feature phone users) and adopts an offline-first PWA design, making it particularly suitable for areas with weak infrastructure and low internet penetration. It provides a replicable technical solution for global power resilience building.

In developing countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, etc., power outages are one of the daily disruptive challenges. Traditional power grids lack refined prediction capabilities, so outages often occur suddenly, causing huge losses to residents' lives (e.g., food preservation), medical care (e.g., operating room power supply), and enterprise production. This project was born to predict outages hours in advance and send alerts, addressing the shortcomings of traditional power grids.

The platform uses a microservices architecture, including five containerized services:

1. Backend: Built on FastAPI, handles business logic and schedules prediction tasks every 4 hours via Celery;
2. ML Engine: Integrates XGBoost (for non-linear feature processing) and Prophet (for time series analysis) models;
3. Frontend: React PWA, supports 7 languages and offline use, displays risk heatmaps via Mapbox GL JS;
4. SMS Gateway: Integrates Jasmin SMS gateway, connects to local operators via SMPP protocol to reduce costs;
5. Data Pipeline: Collects data from OpenWeatherMap (weather), ENTSO-E/EIA (power grid), and crowdsourced reports, mapped to Uber H3 hexagonal index (resolution 8, ~460 meters per cell).

The system executes a prediction cycle every 4 hours:

• Data Fusion: Weather data (updated hourly), power grid data (real-time load/capacity), crowdsourced reports (only confirmed if there are 3+ reports from the same cell);
• Model Work: XGBoost processes multi-dimensional features (weather, historical outages, grid age, etc.) to output probabilities; Prophet identifies time series patterns; the two are weighted and fused to generate risk scores;
• Alert Trigger: Cells are divided into 4 risk levels (low/medium/high/extremely high); SMS/push/email alerts are sent based on user subscription thresholds.

1. Uber H3 Index: Hexagonal grid ensures uniform adjacency, resolution 8 is suitable for community-level prediction;
2. Offline-first PWA: Implements offline data caching and report submission via Service Workers and IndexedDB;
3. Self-built SMS Gateway: Reduces costs by over 80% compared to commercial services, ensuring reliable delivery in developing countries.

Easy deployment: Use Docker Desktop and Git, run docker-compose up -d to start all services. Typical application scenarios:

• Municipal power companies: Supplement SCADA systems and notify residents in advance;
• Hospitals/critical facilities: Activate backup power when alerts are received;
• Community organizations: Establish independent outage monitoring networks;
• Academic research: Analyze grid vulnerability.

Limitations: Prediction accuracy depends on the quality of training data (new regions require a learning period of weeks/months); power grid data source access requires regional customization. Future directions: Introduce transfer learning to accelerate model convergence in new regions; integrate satellite image recognition to detect the status of power grid infrastructure.

AI-Power-Blackout-Predictor is an open-source project with both technical and social value. It integrates machine learning, crowdsourced data, GIS, and mobile communication technologies to provide a practical and scalable solution to power resilience issues in developing countries. For smart city, energy technology, or public welfare technology developers, it is a good choice for reference implementation and community contribution.