Integrating risk analysis and multi-criteria decision support under uncertainty in electricity distribution system asset management

Asset managers in electricity distribution companies generally recognize the need and the challenge of adding structure and a higher degree of formal analysis into the increasingly complex asset management decisions. This implies improving the present asset management practice by making the best use of the available data and expert knowledge and by adopting new methods for risk analysis and decision support and nevertheless better ways to document the decisions made. This paper discusses methods for integrating risk analysis and multi-criteria decision support under uncertainty in electricity distribution system asset management. The focus is on how to include the different company objectives and risk analyses into a structured decision framework when deciding how to handle the physical assets of the electricity distribution network. This paper presents an illustrative example of decision support for maintenance and reinvestment strategies based, using expert knowledge, simplified risk analyses and multi-criteria decision analysis under uncertainty. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.