Intelligent state space pruning for Monte Carlo simulation with applications in composite power system reliability

•A novel method termed intelligent state space pruning is proposed for power system reliability evaluation.•Different metaheuristic algorithms are used for state space pruning.•Comprehensive comparative studies are carried out using standard reliability test systems.

The probabilistic reliability evaluation of composite power systems is a complicated, computation intensive, and combinatorial task. As such evaluation may suffer from issues regarding high dimensionality that lead to an increased need for computational resources, MCS is often used to evaluate the reliability of power systems. In order to alleviate this burden, an analytical method known as state space decomposition has previously been used to prune the state space that is sampled using MCS.This paper extends the state-of-the-art by proposing a novel algorithm known as intelligent state space pruning (ISSP). This algorithm leverages the intelligence of highly modified population based metaheuristic (PBM) algorithms including genetic algorithms (GA), particle swarm optimization (PSO), ant colony optimization (ACO), and artificial immune systems (AIS) to quickly, efficiently, and intelligently prune the state space that is used during MCS. The presented PBMs are modified using domain-specific knowledge to improve their performance and fine tune their intelligence. This new algorithm leads to reductions of up to 90% in total computation time and iterations required for convergence when compared to non-sequential MCS. Results are reported using the IEEE Reliability Test Systems (RTS79/MRTS).