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This study aims at quantitatively assessing the availability indices of various substation automation systems. In order to illustrate the proposed technique, first, nine types of substation automation architectures are reviewed. The reliability block diagrams of various substation automation architectures are then developed. Subsequently, comparative studies are performed to demonstrate the most reliable architectures in comparison with the others. The results obtained by the proposed approach show the impact of repair on availability indices of the automation system. Finally, different sensitivity analyses are conducted for all architectures, where the impact of varying availability of all components on reliability indices of the automation system is illustrated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Considering six common types of substation automation systems (SASs), this paper not only performs a quantitative reliability evaluation of different automated industrial substations, but also assesses the impacts of various automated substations on the distribution system reliability. The technique is based on the event-tree methodology, reliability block diagram approach, and the concept-of-expectation method. The proposed approach is applied to the eight basic industrial substation configurations, and quantitative assessment of reliability benefits from the utilization of substation automation is conducted through a range of studies. The results show the value of using a systematic quantitative approach for investigating the effects of automation systems on substation reliability. The main contributions of this paper are: 1) to give explicit formulas for reliability evaluations of the automated industrial substation with arbitrary time duration of the automatic switching operation; 2) to prove the SAS with a faster automatic switching operation has a higher degree of improvement in the substation reliability indices; 3) to provide an effective tool for ranking the most reliable industrial substation configurations in the presence of various SASs; and 4) to quantitatively evaluate the effects of the automated substation with various SASs on distribution reliability indices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the fact that repair plays a vital role in the reliability modeling, this paper investigates the effects of component repair on the availability, reliability, and component importance analyses of various four substation automation systems (SASs). For this purpose, some explicit expressions are derived for the steady-state availability, mean time to failure, mean time to first failure (MTTF^1), and repair rate regarding a repairable SAS. Then, some numerical results are presented and are accompanied by detailed descriptions of how much increase in the reliability and availability indices of SASs can take place with component repair. Besides, for the repairable model, the results obtained demonstrate the most reliable SAS in comparison with the others. Then, different sensitivity analyses have been carried out for the repairable and the nonrepairable SAS. Finally, some suitable measures of importance are selected and used, thereby knowing which components of a repairable SAS are the most important and how much they can improve the system performance. The results calculated by importance measures can be informative to guide the designers when trying to enhance the performance of a repairable SAS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]