Application of risk analysis and optimization to initiatives for distribution reliability improvement

Power quality encompasses a wide variety of phenomena including traditional measures of reliability. When attempting to improve power quality, the traditional approach is to reduce outages and improve traditional measures of power quality such as SAIDI and SAIFI. This paper provides an approach to evaluating multiple initiatives for reliability improvement via risk assessment applied to the cost and effectiveness of these initiatives. The paper then outlines application of optimization techniques to balance the resources invested in each initiative to obtain the maximum return from the overall composite program