Proposal of computational tool do support maintenance decision for electric power grids

The Equivalent duration of electric power service interruptions per customer unit (DEC) and the Equivalent frequency of electric power service interruptions per customer unit (FEC) are determinant indexes for the application of penalties by the National Agency for Electrical Power (ANEEL) of Brazil over concessionary companies. Established by ANEEL’s ‘Procedures for Electrical Power Distribution on the National Electrical System’ (PRODIST Module 8), these indexes indicate the continuity of services, consequently the quality of services, must be kept low, therefore methodologies capable to support company´s decisions for cost reduction of operations and penalties by underperformance are always wanted. This analysis of power grids’ failures and repair operations uses information about the electrical distribution of the State of Rio de Janeiro converted into data that includes costs and other details surrounding maintenance operations. The objective is to compute and to find the optimum allocation of resources to attenuate most of the impact of power outages. The discrepancies found along the development of this work had to be controlled by averages, standard deviations and the estimation of uncertainties. The steps were established targeting cost reductions opportunities, based on the several documents such as reports provided to ANEEL by the concessionary company responsible for the power distribution for the City of Rio de Janeiro; the PRODIST Module 8; weather data for the areas where the power grids are located; and the month of the year and number of typical occurrences. The conclusions are limited by the choices of computational methods applied, the quality of the information acquired, and by the efforts spent to adjust and reorganize all the information into data.