Reliability and component importance analysis of substation automation systems

This paper aims to present a comprehensive technique to quantitatively assess the reliability of substation automation systems. The technique is based on the tie-sets methodology. In order to demonstrate the application of the proposed technique, a variety of substation automation architectures is first introduced. The associated reliability block diagrams as well as the exact system reliability are then given. The impacts and the degree of importance of various components on the reliability of substation automation systems are presented. Two suitable measures of importance are selected. The first is the Birnbaum’s measure used to determine the bottleneck of the system reliability. The second measure uses criticality importance to diagnose failures and generating repair or inspection checklists.