Asset-Normalized Distribution Reliability Budget Optimization Using Historical Outage Benefits and Work-Type Learning

Overview & Synopsis

Reliability investments compete for constrained capital but are often evaluated in separate programs. This paper presents a data-driven framework that translates historical work orders, geographic asset records, outage events, and costs into comparable customer-minute and customer-interruption benefits at the circuit-zone level. A normalization process maps historical device names and non-isolating assets to current automaticisolating-device zones and links investments to pre- and postconstruction outage histories. Utility data covering more than $250 million in investments completed from 2010 to 2020 are used to estimate benefit factors for seven work types. Those factors feed a mixed-integer portfolio model that selects at most one applicable action per zone under a capital budget. Observed reductions range from 32% to 94% for customer-minutes interrupted and from 43% to 93% for customer interruptions. The framework provides a traceable path from heterogeneous utility records to zone-level reliability investment decisions