A Comprehensive Reliability Strategy for Managing Assets of Redundant Customer Delivery Systems

Abstract

A reliability strategy was developed in 2020 for the purpose of improving the reliability of the dual element spot network (DESN) stations. The strategy utilized the transmission outage data system (TODS) data-base and some reliability models to identify DESN stations with the worst reliability performance so that investment dollars can be directed towards the reliability improvement of those stations. Recently, a comprehensive reliability strategy has been developed to do a similar task of improving the overall reliability of the DESN stations. The new strategy first maps the delivery point interruption data to the TODS outage data to determine the frequencies of the main causes of supply interruptions to delivery points. Then, it identifies action plans (or remedial actions) that are needed in order to reduce the frequencies of the dominant outage causes. Finally, the strategy uses a benefit/cost analysis to select the preferred action plans in order to improve the overall reliability of the DESN stations. The new strategy is more practical and has numerous advantages over the existing one. The purpose of this paper is to describe the new reliability strategy, its advantages over the existing one and to show how to apply it in the DESN stations.