Analysis of reliability as assessed by utility fault data

Considerable resources are used to collect failure data from service, however only limited use is generally made of these data. The goals of this study were: to identify if the data regularly collected by utilities can be used to estimate system reliability; to identify useful methods to analyse failure data typically collected by utilities; to recommend the format for data collection; and to identify the major trends. The data for this study have been extracted from a variety of power cable sources. The paper discusses initial analysis of mean failure rates, and reliability analysis