Mitigation of Interruption Reimbursements by Periodic Network Reconfiguration: Risk-Based Versus Expected-Value Optimization

The reimbursement for violation of customer quality standards such as maximal interruption frequency and duration is at the basis of modern quality of service regulation. In order to satisfy quality standards, distribution operators periodically reconfigure the network so as to minimize the risk of reimbursement. Reconfiguration relies upon reliability analysis of an “average year” and usually neglects the risk induced by failure variance. This is because the assessment of risk represents a considerable burden for real-scale systems. In this paper, we study the decision error induced by analyzing “average years” and investigate the evolution of this error with the periodicity of reconfiguration. Examples are given for illustrating the main results.