Customer interruption cost calculation for reliability economics: practical considerations

This paper is concerned with the calculation of customer interruption costs. The fundamental engineering problem of interest is how to choose the best cost representation that our available data and predictive reliability technique will permit. The objective is to calculate interruption costs as accurately as possible. A practical difficulty in assessing these costs is the need to deal with approximate data and to maintain a delicate balance of various approximations introduced at various stages of the process. This requires sound understanding of the processes involved which are illustrated in this paper.