Patent ID: 7920997

Claim:
A computer program product for enabling a computer to normalize reliability indices for common weather conditions in a target year with respect to a baseline year's reliability performance, comprising: software instructions for enabling the computer to perform predetermined operations; and a computer readable medium bearing the software instructions; the predetermined operations including: compiling common weather data comprising a plurality of weather variables, compiling interruption data, determining outlier thresholds for the common weather conditions, determining the outlier threshold for interruption data, identifying outliers in common weather data for the target year, identifying outliers in interruption data for the target year, identifying outliers in common weather data for the baseline year, identifying outliers in interruption data for the baseline year, identifying outlier intersections of the target year, identifying outlier intersections of the baseline year, using a hyper geometric probability distribution to determine whether the weather outliers and interruption outliers are related or intersected randomly, and adjusting the interruption data of the target year to account for the interference by common weather conditions, wherein the computer normalizes reliability indices for common weather conditions in a target year with respect to a baseline year's reliability performance.