Quantifying resilience for distribution system customers with SALEDI

2026-02-07

AI Summary

Traditional distribution system reliability indices struggle to effectively quantify the extreme impacts of major outages on customers due to their limitations in handling the high variability in customer interruption durations. To address this, this work proposes the System Average Large Event Duration Index (SALEDI), which innovatively applies a logarithmic transformation to customer interruption minutes to construct a more robust resilience metric. Requiring only standard outage data, SALEDI is validated through statistical analysis and comparative evaluation against existing indices using real-world data from five utility companies. The results demonstrate that SALEDI accurately, practically, and compatibly captures customer resilience during extreme events, offering a significant improvement over conventional reliability measures in characterizing tail-risk outage impacts.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Anomaly/Outlier Detection
• Search and Optimization: Distributed Search

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization

Abstract

The impact of routine smaller outages on distribution system customers in terms of customer minutes interrupted can be tracked using conventional reliability indices. However, the customer minutes interrupted in large blackout events are extremely variable, and this makes it difficult to quantify the customer impact of these extreme events with resilience metrics. We solve this problem with the System Average Large Event Duration Index SALEDI that logarithmically transforms the customer minutes interrupted. We explain how this new resilience metric works, compare it with alternatives, quantify its statistical accuracy, and illustrate its practical use with standard outage data from five utilities.

Problem

• resilience
• distribution system
• large blackout events
• customer minutes interrupted
• reliability indices

Innovation

• resilience metric
• SALEDI
• large blackout events
• logarithmic transformation
• distribution system reliability