Reliability Modeling of Electricity Transmission Systems: An Adaptation of Traditional Reliability Methods

Jose Francisco Espiritu Nolasco, David W. Coit, Upyukt Prakash Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ 08854, USA Jose Emmanuel Ramirez-Marquez Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management, Stevens Institute of Technology, Castle Point on Hudson, Hoboken NJ 07030, USA Abstract - For power industry systems, reliability is related to the ability of the system to provide an adequate supply of electrical energy [2-5]. However, reliability related measures are fundamentally different to those used in traditional reliability practice. System reliability is related to the probability that a product/service will operate properly for a specified period of time under the design operating conditions without failure [1]. In standard reliability theory, this probabilistic perspective has been generally used to model and analyze the reliability of a product/service. Reliability related measures such as availability, mean time to failure, importance measures, etc. are also based on such probabilistic perspective. When considering electric power system reliability, researchers and analysts are interested in how component outages and repair rates affect the associated overall system rates. Primary interest is devoted to the quantification of system failures; this quantification is then translated to expected system outage rates, mean outage duration and overall downtime. Keywords: Reliability, Outage Rates, Power Systems 1 Introduction Due to the different perspectives that traditional and electric power systems maintain with regard to system reliability evaluation, this research has devoted research efforts to develop electric power reliability models for any configuration as long as the failures for the system are specified. There are different types of failure categories; some of them are permanent, switching and transient system failures. The present work focuses on the reliability modeling of permanent and switching system failures of electricity transmission systems. Importance measures are important tools to evaluate and rank the impact of individual components within a system. For electricity transmission systems, previously developed measures do not meet all user needs. For this reason, there is a need for criticality measures that evaluate, in a more accurate way, the reliability modeling of electricity transmission systems. In the present research, we are developing new criticality measures that can be used in this type of
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systems. At the end of this paper, an example is presented for the reliability modeling of the breaker-and-a-half scheme, a common configuration. 2 Background Over the past few years, the overall reliability of the electrical transmission network in the United States has become a national concern. In addition, as the challenges associated with the move to deregulation continue to develop, financial and market forces are demanding a more optimal and profitable operation of the power system, through an open-access power delivery environment. To achieve both operational reliability and financial profitability, it has become clear that more efficient utilization and control of the existing transmission system infrastructure is required. Electricity transmission lines provide the transport highways to move electricity from the generation sources to concentrated areas of customers. From there, the distribution system moves the electricity to where the customer uses it at a business or home. The transmission systems are unique because they are designed to move this energy at the speed of light from the generator to the consumer since there is no long-term storage capability for electricity. Electricity, when transmitted, flows over all available paths to reach the customer and it cannot be easily directed in one particular way. Therefore, the buying and selling of electricity requires direct coordination and proactive monitoring of the electrical systems. If a problem develops somewhere, the impact affects other operations elsewhere. For power industry systems, reliability is related to the ability of the system to provide an adequate supply of electrical energy [2-5] and is used for evaluation of system availability. However, reliability related measures are fundamentally different to those used in traditional reliability practice. When considering electric power system reliability, researchers and analysts are interested in how component outages and repair rates affect the associated overall system rates. Primary interest is devoted to the quantification of system failures; this quantification is then translated to system expected outage rates, mean outage duration (repair time) and overall downtime.

Due to the different perspectives that traditional and electric power systems maintain with regard to system reliability evaluation, the initial phase of this research has devoted research efforts to develop electric power reliability models for any configuration as long as failure definition can be specified. Notation

ij = Sustained outage rate for component j in subsystem i. i=1,..n; j=1,..,mi

m S = Sustained outage rate for subsystem i.
i i

s p =Sustained outage rate for series-parallel system.

rij =Average repair time for component j in subsystem i.
i = Average repair time for subsystem i. rSm i

rs p =Average repair time for series parallel system.

U s p = Expected downtime for series parallel system.
mi US = Expected downtime for subsystem i due to sustained outage. i

3 Reliability modeling and analysis Figure 1 shows a series-parallel system, with n subsystems arranged in series. Each subsystem has mj components arranged in parallel (j=1,2,..n). The formulas given by Billington and Allan (2,3) and Billington and Li (4) have been generalized to analyze this type of configuration.

Fig. 1. Series-Parallel system Billington & Allan and Billington & Li present a direct approximation formula for systems with a series configuration:
n

s p = m S ....(1)
i

i =1

That is, the outage rate for a series-parallel design is the sum of the outage rates associated to each of the parallel subsystems. Based on the formulas presented by Billington & Allan [2,3] and Billington & Li [4] a general formulation for subsystem i can be given as:

mi Si

mi = ij r j1 r j2 ...r jmi ...(2) j =1 j1 < j2 <..< jmi

The above formula is a direct extension of the approach presented by Billington & Allan [2]. For example for a two-component parallel subsystem the formula yields:

2 S = 11 12 (r11 + r12 ) = 11 r11 12 + 12 r12 11

I
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Since analytical methods for the estimation of system reliability uncertainty are based on reliability formulations, a more direct and concise formula has been developed. The purpose of this new approach is to compute metrics based on a recursive technique. This recursive rationale
i is applied to most of the metrics proposed. A recursive formula for m S i , a parallel subsystem, is

given by:
m 1 m im (rSm 1 + rim )(3) S = S
i i i i i i i i

This recursive technique can be employed as follows: The recursion will consist of exactly mi computations or recursions. The first recursion considers that of the original parallel subsystems with mi components, only the first component is considered and its outage rate is
1 1 computed, i.e. 1 S i . However, S i = i1 and rS i = ri1 . The second recursion considers that, of the

original parallel subsystem with mi components, only the first two components are considered and its outage rate is computed, i.e. 2 S i . Thus,
m 1 2 im (rSm 1 + rim )= 1S i 2 (rSm1 + ri 2 ) = i1i 2 (ri1 + ri 2 ) (4) S = S
i i i i i i i i i

mi 1 mi 1 i + rimi . In the same form, the remaining recursions can be used to compute m S i = S i imi rS i

Mathematically the recursion is as follows: 1. 1 S i = i1

mi 1 mi 1 2. 2 + rimi S i = S i imi rS i

.
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mi 1 mi 1 i mi . m + rimi S i = S i imi rS i

Equation 3 follows from the idea that a parallel system with mi components can be regarded as a new parallel system with two components. The first component of this new system has an
i 1 . That is. This first component includes the first mi 1 actual associated failure rate of m Si

components connected in parallel. The second component of the transformed system is just the last component in the original system configuration, i.e. mi . It must be noted that equation 3
i 1 depends on the a priori knowledge of rSm , the associated outage (repair) time associated to the i

first mi 1 components. Thus the same rationale has been applied to obtain metrics related to the average repair time and the total outage time.
4 Expected Outage Duration (Average Repair Time)

Direct approximation formulas for systems with a series configuration has been proposed by Billington & Allan [2,3] and Billington & Li [4] as:
n

rs p =

i =1

mi mi Si Si

s p

..(5)

i A recursive formula for rSm can be obtained by: i i 1 rSm rimi i i 1 rSm + rimi i

mi Si

..(6)

As in equation 3, the recursive formula presented in equation 6 consists of exactly mi computations or recursions. The first recursion considers that of the original parallel subsystem with mi components, only the first component is considered and its outage duration is computed. The second recursion considers that of the original parallel subsystem with mi components only the first two components are contemplated and its outage duration is computed, the same rationale can be applied to the remaining recursions to compute equation (6).
5 Outage time

Finally, the average system outage time for series-parallel systems is given by:

mi U S P = s p rs p = U S .(7) i i =1 n

mi mi mi mi mi i Where, U S = m S i rS i = U S i , S i and rS i are given by equations (3) and (6). i i =1

6 Reliability Modeling in Power Systems

Reliability analysis for a power system leads to a more reliable and cost-effective operation, since power restoration analysis is a subset of the calculations performed for reliability analysis. The system reliability is affected by the following aspects: varying load in the system, switch/protective device placement, switch operation times, available alternative feeds, equipment current limits, equipment failure rates and equipment repair times. The present research is mainly focused in the reliability modeling of permanent and switching/protective system outage rates.
6.1 Types of outages:

Each component of an electric power system can fail or there can be an outage in a different number of ways. It is often unrealistic to group or pool these together and associate with them a single average value of system outage rate and restoration time. For instance, separation of events is important if they have different effects on the system or are associated with very different restoration processes. Four particular outage events are permanent, switching, transient and scheduled. Permanent outages are associated with damaged faults requiring the component to be repaired or replaced to restore the power supply. Switching outages are associated with undamaged faults that are restored by manual switching. Transient outages are again associated with undamaged faults but are restored automatically and scheduled maintenance outages are those, which are planned in advance in order to perform preventive maintenance.
6.2 Switching operations.

There are two kinds of switching operations of interest. One is isolating the failure point so that a load point of interest, which has lost power, may be re-supplied from the original source. The
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other is to again isolate the failure point and to feed a load point of interest from an alternate source, if an alternate source is available.
6.3 Role of circuit breakers and power system protection zones

When a power system component is faulted, all circuit breakers in the protection zone of the component (i.e., circuit breakers electrically connected to the component in question) open to isolate the faulted component. The system operator will then intervene to open some disconnected switches that are located on both sites of the breakers and to re-close some of the open breakers if necessary in order to restore electric supply to customers. The time associated with the whole process is called the switching time for the component (time required to isolate the faulted component and restore electric supply to customers). Figure 2 shows the breaker and a half system working under normal conditions.

Fig.2. breaker-and-a-half

Fig.3. L2 faulted; B2 and B3 open

Fig.4. DS2 open, L2 isolated; B2 and B3 re-closed

Figure 3 shows that when L2 is faulted, both B2 and B3 are open and the electric supply will not be restored until line 2 is repaired. The system operator may isolate L2 using its disconnect switch DS2 as is shown in figure 4 and may re-close B2 and B3 in order to restore electricity supply.
6.4 Modeling of permanent outages

The breaker-and-a-half structure is shown in Figure 2, some other examples of electricity transmission systems are shown below.

Fig. 5. Electrical diagram 1

Fig. 6. Electrical diagram 2

Figure 2, the Breaker-and-a-half configuration, will be used as an example in the following sections. Figure 7 presents the equivalent reliability block diagram of the components. L1 and L2 represent the two lines; components B1, B2 and B3, the three breakers while S1 and S2 represent the buses.

Fig. 7 Breaker and a Half Reliability Block Diagram This configuration has nine different sets of components that guarantee system failure. Such sets commonly known as minimal cut sets are: {L1, L2}, {L1, B2, B3}, {L2, B1, B3}, {L1, S2, B3}, {L2,

S1, B3}, {B1, B2}, {S1, B2}, {B1, S2} and {S1, S2} A series-parallel transformation based on these
component failure sets can be used to approximate the reliability metrics. Figure 8 illustrates the series-parallel transformation for the present configuration.

Fig. 8. Breaker and a half series-parallel transformation

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Once we have transformed the electric diagram into the series parallel block diagram, we can obtain the reliability of the system by using different outage rates for the components in the system. Analytical formulas were previously developed to calculate the overall system reliability. Table 1 shows the results for different values of outage rates and repair durations for the components in the breaker-and-a-half scheme. It has been assumed that equivalent components have the same reliability data (share the same data). The outage rates and repair times are in outages per year and hour units respectively. The results obtained by the analytical formula were compared with the results obtained by Monte Carlo simulation. We can see that the results obtained in the examples shows great accuracy of the newly developed formulas. Table 1.Component data and results for the Breaker-and-a-half scheme. Reliability estimates Outage rate Repair Duration Downtime Reliability estimates Outage rate Repair Duration Downtime
7 Conclusions

Case 1 Component Lines (L1, L2) 0.619 36 Breakers (B1, B2, B3) 0.2 96 Case 2 Component Lines (L1, L2) 0.719 96 Breakers (B1, B2, B3) 0.25 120 Buses (S1, S2) 0.35 36 Buses (S1, S2) 0.3 18

System Simulation Analytical 0.0057 21.05 0.12 System Simulation Analytical 0.015 43.4 0.682 0.0172 43.75 0.752 0.0059 21.09 0.125

The present work shows how the traditional reliability modeling was used to model electric power transmission systems, where the reliability was mainly related to the ability of the system to provide an adequate supply of electrical energy. For this purpose, component outages and repair rates were taken into account, commonly used approximation techniques for analyzing the reliability for series and systems have been extended to accommodate additional configurations.
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The series parallel approximation can be applied to any system provided the sets of components that guarantee system failure (minimal cut sets).
References:

1. Elsayed, E. (1996). Reliability Engineering, Addison Wesley Longman Inc.New York. 2. Billinton, R. and Allan, R. (1983). Reliability Evaluation of Engineering Systems. Plenum Press, London. 3. Billinton, R. and Allan, R. (1984). Reliability Evaluation of Power Systems. Plenum Press, London. 4. Billinton, R. and Li, W. (1994) Reliability Assessment of Electric Power Systems Using Monte Carlo Methods Plenum Press, New York. 5. Billinton, R. and Zhang, W. (2000). State extension for adequacy evaluation of composite power systems- applications, IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, Vol.15, No. 1, 427-432.

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