Improving the Reliability of Breaker-and-a-Half

Substations Using Sectionalized Busbars

M. B. Stevens
S. Santoso
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
The University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX, USA
mbstevens@utexas.edu

AbstractIn utility power system substation design, the
breaker-and-a-half topology is frequently used, primarily
because it is considered very reliable. This paper aims to
demonstrate that by adding sectionalizing circuit breakers into
the busbars of the breaker-and-a-half configuration, the
reliability of this substation design can be improved. Using a
combinatorics-based approach to combining reliability indices
of substation component failures, combined with using minimal
cut sets of reliability graphs to identify failure scenarios, overall
system failure rates were calculated for various substation
topologies. The results demonstrate that the sectionalized
breaker-and-a-half topology reduces the substations failure rate
by 70.8% and its total annual downtime by 28.9% compared to
a typical breaker-and-a-half scheme, although at the cost of
increasing the mean time to repair of a substation failure by 2.49
hours.
Index Terms-- Power Systems, Power System Reliability,
Substations.
I. INTRODUCTION
Reliability studies of utility power system substations
have often concerned themselves with comparisons of
different architectures used within the substation to connect
incoming (source-side) lines to outgoing (load-side) lines. As
substations can potentially supply power to a very large
number of downstream customers, it is very important that
they be very reliable. In most reliability studies, the breaker-
and-a-half topology is identified as among the most reliable
configurations [1].
Many approaches have been developed for the modeling
of substation reliability and the derivation of accompanying
reliability indices. Of these, most concern themselves
primarily with the failure rate of individual components
within the substation, identifying which components or
combinations of multiple components failures would cause
the substation as a whole to fail. In substation reliability,
system failure is defined as no paths existing between the
incoming and outgoing lines. Assigning each component a
set of reliability indices, aggregate reliability indices can be
The work presented herein is supported in part by the U.S Office of Naval
Research Contract Number: N0014-08-1-0080.
created by considering every situation in which the station
fails.
The components usually considered include transmission
lines, transformers, reactors, buses, circuit breakers, reclosers,
and switches. Each component has several associated failure
states, as applicable, including fault, preventative
maintenance, false trip, and stuck. Failures are distinguished
as either passive, when they do not trigger the operation of
adjacent protective devices, and active, when they do. Two
or more component failures occurring in sequence, with the
subsequent failures occurring before the initial failure is
repaired, are referred to as second- and higher-order failures.
Many papers on substation reliability only concern
themselves with limited types of third- or higher-order failure
events, or neglect them entirely [2], as the likelihood of
failures drops off steeply as the order increases.
Reliability indices evaluated usually include failure rate,
average outage duration, and total annual outage time. Each
component has an associated value for each index, with
average outage duration being a function of the average repair
time and total outage time being the product of the other two
indices. Then each first- and second-order failure event can
be given a set of reliability indices by probabilistically
combining the indices of the components involved in each
event. Finally, a set of overall substation reliability indices
can be derived by combining the indices of each failure event
that results in substation failure [1].
A wide variety of approaches to modeling these indices
have been developed, including the use of state enumeration
through minimal cut sets [3] or fault tree analysis [4], and
calculation of reliability indices through combinatorics-based
probability models [1], [5], Markov chains [2], [6], sequential
Monte Carlo methods [7], [8], and treating reliability indices
as random variables [9]. This paper will utilize a minimal cut
set approach to enumerating failure states and a
combinatorics-based probability model to calculate reliability
indices.

978-1-4799-1303-9/13/$31.00 2013 IEEE

 II. SUBSTATION CONFIGURATIONS C. Ring Bus
To ensure a more direct comparison between topologies, The ring bus configuration consists of four busbars
all configurations considered will have two incoming and two arranged into a ring, with each bus sectionalized by a circuit
outgoing lines. breaker (Fig. 3). This configuration contains sufficient
redundancy that no first-order failure will cause the system to
A. Single Bus, Single Breaker fail.
The most basic substation arrangement is the single bus,
single breaker. Sources are attached to a single busbar that
feeds the outgoing lines, each line protected by a single
circuit breaker (see Fig. 1). Cursory inspection shows that
this topology is very vulnerable to failures, as any single
active failure of any of the circuit breakers or the busbar will
result in system failure. This arrangement will therefore be
used as our baseline of reliability against which we will
compare other, more robust, arrangements.

Figure 3. Ring Bus arrangement.

D. Breaker-and-a-Half
The Breaker-and-a-Half arrangement consists of two
parallel busbars, connected by two lines. Each connecting
line contains three circuit breakers, an incoming line and an
outgoing line (Fig. 4). This configuration contains a
significant amount of redundancy, even more than the ring
bus. However, this increased redundancy also means more
Figure 1. Single Bus, Single Breaker arrangement. components are involved, increasing the number of possible
failure points. Like the ring bus, the breaker-and-a-half
B. Sectionalized Bus arrangement cannot fail due to a first-order failure.
The sectionalized bus arrangement is simply the single
bus, single breaker configuration with the addition of a
sectionalizing circuit breaker on the busbar separating the two
pairs of incoming and outgoing lines (Fig. 2). This adds a
layer of protection, ensuring that if a bus fault occurs, or if
there is a short circuit in one of the line breakers, only one
side of the substation will be taken down, while the other side
remains operational. A short circuit in the bus breaker will
still result in system failure, as will a number of second- and
higher-order failures, but this topology nonetheless represents
an improvement in reliability over the single bus, single
breaker arrangement.

Figure 4. Breaker-and-a-Half arrangement.

E. Breaker-and-a-Half with Sectionalized Buses

This configuration takes the breaker-and-a-half design
and adds a sectionalizing circuit breaker onto each busbar,
separating the two connecting lines (Fig. 5).

Figure 2. Single Bus, Single Breaker arrangement with a sectionalized bus.


Figure 5. Breaker-and-a-Half arrangement with sectionalized buses.
III. METHODOLOGY
Each potential component failure is assigned a set of
reliability indices, failure rate (), mean time to repair
(MTTR), and total annual downtime, as shown in Table I [1],
[4], [10]. Only circuit breakers and busbars are considered as
substation components. As their number and position does
not vary between different topologies, incoming/outgoing
lines, transformers, fuses and other components are
considered to be outside of the substation and thus irrelevant
to our comparison. Busbars can experience only active
failures, such as a fault. Circuit Breakers can experience
three kinds of failures: active failures, such as insulation
breakdowns resulting in a fault, passive failures, such as false
tripping, and stuck conditions, when a breaker fails to open
during an adjacent active failure.
TABLE I. COMPONENT RELIABILITY INDICES
Reliability Index
Component Failure MTTR Total Downtime
(hours) (hours/year)
Busbar Active 12 0.288
Circuit Breaker Active 12 0.12
Circuit Breaker Passive 12 0.12
Circuit Breaker Stuck 1 0.005a
a. Stuck condition is modeled as a probability. That is, there is a 0.5%
chance that a given breaker will not open when needed.
Second- and third-order failures are modeled by
multiplying probabilities. All failures are assumed to be
independent and uniformly distributed throughout the year.
From this assumption, the failure rate (in #/year) for a
second-order failure is the failure rate of the first component
(in #/year) times the failure rate of the second component (in
#/MTTR). This represents the chance that the second
component fails before the first can be repaired. For
example, the failure rate of a second-order failure in which a
busbar experiences an active failure, followed by a circuit
breaker experiencing a passive failure before the busbar can
be repaired can be calculated as follows:
bus+CB-P = bus (CB-P MTTRbus/8766),
where 8766 is the number of hours in a 365.25 day year.
Similar logic applies to calculating third-order failure
rates. If we wish to calculate the failure rate for a scenario in
which failures A, B, and C occur before failure A is repaired,
we calculate the second-order failure rate for failures A and
B, then multiply by the failure rate of failure C (in #/MTTR-
A). For example, the failure rate of a third-order failure in
which the second-order failure described above occurs,
followed by a second circuit breaker experiencing an active
fault before the busbar can be repaired can be calculated as
follows:
bus+CB-P+CB-A = bus+CB-P (CB-A MTTRbus/8766). (2)
As mentioned in the footnote of Table I, stuck breaker
failures are modeled as a simple probability. The failure rate
of a second- or third-order failure involving a stuck breaker
condition is equal to the failure rate of the corresponding
first- or second-order failure without the stuck breaker
multiplied by the stuck breaker probability shown in Table I.
For example, the failure rate of a second-order failure in
which a busbar experiences an active failure and an adjacent
circuit breaker experiences a stuck condition is given by:
bus+CB-S = bus CB-S. (3)
Fourth- and higher-order failures are not considered.
Failure scenarios are enumerated using minimal cut sets.
A reliability graph is constructed, each node representing a
component and each edge identifying which components are
adjacent to each other. Two nodes on opposite ends of the
graph represent the sources and the outgoing lines,
respectively. Failure scenarios are identified by removing
exactly as many nodes, as well as the edges incident upon
them, as is needed to disconnect the source node from the
load node. The sets of nodes removed are called minimal cut
Failure Rate sets. Different failure types follow different rules for node
(#/year) and edge removal, with passive failures removing only that
0.024 components node and incident edges, while active failures
and any accompanying stuck breakers remove all adjacent
0.01 nodes and their incident edges (as well as further nodes and
edges if an adjacent node represents a busbar, which behaves
0.01 in the same manner as a stuck breaker).
Fig. 6 shows an example of a reliability graph and the
representation of two fault scenarios. Fig. 6a is a Single Bus,
Single Breaker arrangement with a sectionalized bus
represented by a reliability graph. Fig. 6b shows a first-order,
active failure in circuit breaker 2. The arrows show the
failure propagating through bus 2 to circuit breakers 4 and 5,
which open, containing the fault. As can be seen, there still
exists a path between the source and load nodes, thus this
failure does not constitute a cut set. Fig. 6c shows a second-
order failure: circuit breaker 2 experiences an active failure,
as in Fig. 6b, and circuit breaker 5 becomes stuck, allowing
the failure to propagate through to bus 1 and circuit breakers
1 and 3. The source and load nodes are disconnected in this
scenario, so this second-order failure is a minimal cut set of
the graph, and thus is a substation failure.
Because each failure scenario is a minimal cut set of the
(1) reliability graph, the set of component failures included in a
second- or third-order failure does not contain any proper MTTR of the substation is the average of the MTTRs of the
subsets of component failures that themselves represent a failure scenarios, each scenarios value weighted by its
substation failure. From this fact and our assumptions that corresponding failure rate.
failures are uniformly distributed and independent, the MTTR
for a second- and third-order failure is 6 and 4 hours, IV. RESULTS
respectively. These times represent, on average, the time The reliability indices of the five substation topologies
between the final components failure and the repair of the considered are summarized in Table III, as well as Figs. 7-9.
first component that failed, which will return the substation to
operation. Any failure involving a stuck breaker has a MTTR
of 1 hour. TABLE III. SUBSTATION RELIABILITY INDICES

Reliability Index
Substation
Arrangement MTTR Total Downtime Failure Rate
(hours) (hours/year) (#/year)
Single Bus, Single
11.999974 0.768001643 0.06400027
Breaker
Single Bus, Single
Breaker with 11.657036 0.120340567 0.01032343
(a)
Sectionalized Bus
Ring Bus 1.0675151 0.000440691 0.00041282

Breaker-and-a-Half 2.4432985 1.04285E-05 4.2682E-06

Breaker-and-a-Half
5.9297684 7.41002E-06 1.2496E-06
with Sectionalized Bus

(b)

(c)

Figure 6. (a) A reliability graph of the Single Bus, Single Breaker with
sectionalized bus topology. (b) A first-order failure, which the substation
survives. (c) A second-order failure, which the substation does not survive.

Substation reliability indices of failure rate and total

downtime are calculated by summing the respective indices
of each failure scenario. Mean time to repair is calculated
through an average of the MTTR of each failure scenario,
weighted by each scenarios failure rate.
Table II shows the calculation of the overall substation
reliability indices for the Single Bus, Single Breaker
topology. Second-order failure rates are calculated using (1).
Note that there are no third-order minimal cut sets for this
arrangement. The total failure rate and total downtime of the
substation are the sums of the failure rates and total
downtimes of the individual failure scenarios listed. The total
Figure 7. Substation failure rates.
The two Single Bus, Single Breaker configurations are
inferior to the other three configurations in terms of all three
reliability indices. However, these configurations contain
fewer busbars than the other three topologies, and fewer
circuit breakers than the two Breaker-and-a-Half topologies.
In situations where cost is of greater importance than
reliability, then, these configurations may be preferable.
The Ring Bus topology has the lowest mean time to repair

TABLE II. CALCULATION OF SINGLE BUS, SINGLE BREAKER SUBSTATION RELIABILITY INDICES
Total Downtime Failure Rate
Failure 1 Failure 2 Failure 3 MTTR (hours)
(hours/year) (#/year)
Bus (A) 12 0.288 0.024
CB1 (A) 12 0.12 0.01
CB2 (A) 12 0.12 0.01
CB3 (A) 12 0.12 0.01
CB4 (A) 12 0.12 0.01
CB1 (P) CB2 (P) 6 8.21355E-07 1.36893E-07
CB3 (P) CB4 (P) 6 8.21355E-07 1.36893E-07
TOTAL 11.99997433 0.768001643 0.064000274
of the five substations, though it fails more often than either of
the Breaker-and-a-Half configurations. This is due to the fact
that the majority of the failure scenarios in a Ring Bus
substation involve stuck breakers. Stuck breaker conditions
occur more frequently than overlapping active or passive
failures, but can be repaired much more quickly, as can be
seen in Table I. Therefore the ring bus may be preferable in
situations in which the loads being served can sustain a greater
number of short failures better than a lesser number of failures
of a greater duration. The low MTTR of a ring bus topology
as compared to a breaker-and-a-half arrangement has been
observed in previous studies [1], [6].
Figure 8. Substation Mean Times to Repair.
Figure 9. Substation Total Annual Downtimes.
The results demonstrate a higher level of reliability in both
failure rate and total annual downtime in the sectionalized
breaker-and-a-half configuration as compared to the
arrangement without sectionalizing breakers. The downside
of this change can be seen in Fig. 8, as the failures of the
sectionalized arrangement take, on average, longer to repair
than those in the standard version. This is because most of the
failure scenarios for the standard breaker-and-a-half
configuration that are prevented by the sectionalized busbars
involve stuck breakers. As mentioned above, these failures,
while being relatively frequent compared to active or passive
circuit breaker failures, also can be repaired much quicker.
However, this increase in MTTR is more than offset by the
reduced failure rate, as can be seen in Fig. 9.
The sectionalized breaker-and-a-half topology, then,
would be most useful in a situation where one is trying to
minimize the number of failures that occur, regardless of their
duration. The traditional breaker-and-a-half topology
represents a middle ground between the ring bus and
sectionalized breaker-and-a-half.
V. CONCLUSIONS
A minimal cut set approach to failure state enumeration
and a combinatorics-based probability model of reliability
indices leads to the conclusion that the Breaker-and-a-Half
substation topology can be made more reliable by including
sectionalizing circuit breakers in the busbars. This
configuration has a lower failure rate and total annual
downtime than the four other topologies modeled, though it
has a higher mean time to repair than the ring bus and the
breaker-and-a-half scheme without sectionalized busbars. Of
these three topologies, the ring bus has the lowest MTTR and
the highest failure rate and total annual downtime, with the
traditional breaker-and-a-half falling between the other two
topologies in all three indices.
In the future, the comparison made here between the
sectionalized breaker-and-a-half topology and other substation
arrangements can be corroborated and refined though the use
of other established approaches to reliability modeling. The
comparison can be further refined though the inclusion of
economic concerns or comparisons against other, more
complex substation arrangements.
REFERENCES
[1] M. S. Grover, R. Billinton, A Computerized Approach to Substation
and Switching Station Reliability Evaluation, IEEE PES, November
1973.
[2] X. F. Wang, X. L. Wang, Generalized Outage Table Approach to
Reliability Study of Power Stations Bus Schemes, IEEE Trans. PD,
Vol. 12, No. 4, October 1997.
[3] R.N. Allan, M.F. de Oliveira, Reliability Modeling and Evaluation of
Transmission and Distribution Systems, PROC. IEEE, Vol. 124, No.
6, June 1977.
[4] Z. Liu, Reliability Analysis of Breaker Arrangements in High Voltage
Stations: A Fault Tree Analysis, Chalmers University of Technology,
Goteborg, Sweden, 2008.
[5] Z. Dong, D. O. Koval, J. E. Propst, Reliability of Various Industrial
Substations, IEEE Trans. IA, Vol. 40, No. 4, August 2004.
[6] J. J. Meeuwsen, W. L. Kling, Substation Reliability Evaluation
including Switching Actions with Redundant Components, IEEE
Trans. PD, Vol. 12, No. 4, October 1997.
[7] R. Billinton, G. Lian, Monte Carlo approach to substation reliability
evaluation, IEEE Proc.-C, Vol. 140, No. 2, March 1993.
[8] C. J. Zapata, A. Alzate, M. A. Rios, Reliability Assessment of
Substations using Stochastic Point Processes and Monte Carlo
Simulation, IEEE PES, July 2010.
[9] R. Billinton, R. Goel, An Analytical Approach to Evaluate Probability
Distributions Associated with the Reliability Indices of Electric
Distribution Systems, IEEE Trans. PD, Vol. PWRD-1, No. 3, July
1986.
[10] R. N. Allen, J. R. Ochoa, "Modeling and Assessment of Station
Originated Outages for Composite Systems Reliability Evaluation",
IEEE Trans. PS, February 1988.