Using data envelopment analysis to evaluate the performance of post-hurricane electric power restoration activities

Allison C. Reilly, Rachel A. Davidson, Linda K. Nozick, Thomas Chen and Seth D. Guikema

Reliability Engineering and System Safety, 2016, vol. 152, issue C, 197-204

Abstract: Post-hurricane restoration of electric power is attracting increasing scrutiny as customers’ tolerance for even short power interruptions decreases. At the peak, 8.5 million customers were without power after Hurricane Sandy and over 1 million customers were without power more than a week after the storm made landfall. Currently, restoration processes are typically evaluated on a case-by-case basis by a regional public service commission or similar body and lack systematic comparisons to other restoration experiences. This paper introduces a framework using data envelopment analysis to help evaluate post-hurricane restorations through comparison with the experiences of other companies in similar storms. The method accounts for the variable severity of the hurricanes themselves, so that companies are not penalized for outages that are long only because the hurricane that caused them was particularly severe. The analysis is illustrated through an application comparing 27 recent post-hurricane restoration experiences across 13 different electric power companies in the United States. The results of the study show some consistency in performance among individual utilities after the hurricanes they experience. The method could be applied to other types of infrastructure systems and other extreme events as well.

Keywords: Hurricane; Electric-power system restoration; Data envelopment analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:reensy:v:152:y:2016:i:c:p:197-204

DOI: 10.1016/j.ress.2016.03.007

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