PacifiCorp´s development and use of enhanced reliability analysis tools

The implementation of automated outage management systems has delivered to the reliability engineer better information from which to create tools to analyze, evaluate and develop reliability improvements. PacifiCorp has found that being able to synthesize reliability data from a time-dependent view, a tabular-based view and a geospatial-based view leads to well-formulated reliability conclusions.It is highly beneficial to be able to overlay interruptions and outages within a geographic context to interpret location-based performance; this provides an optimal complement to a tabular or time-series view of outage data. Certain types of outage events or customer interruption patterns are quite complex and an understanding of how, when and even why the system is performing as it is may sometimes only be rationalized after data is presented in this manner, which can prompt corrective action or create customer and local community understanding of system performance. The next evolution of reliability tools leverages off of the geospatial and time series tools to refine key thresholds being exceeded and warranting investigation, development of failure rates to consider future outage vulnerabilities within circuits. These developments have also resulted in the need to enhance tools to trigger and document post-outage analysis. This paper will explore a variety of methods of presenting and evaluating such performance patterns, identify actions that were taken to remedy performance gaps and discuss the effectiveness of these methods in improving system reliability.