RELIABILITY OF SMART GRID SYSTEMS WITH WARM STANDBY SPARES AND IMPERFECT COVERAGE

摘要

This paper models the reliability of a smart grid system with warm standby spares and imperfect fault coverage based on binary decision diagrams (BDD). In order to meet stringent reliability requirement, it is essential for a smart grid system to be designed with fault tolerance. The Warm standby SParing (WSP) is an important fault tolerance technique which compromises the energy consumption and the recovery time. For WSP, the standby units have different failure rates before and after they are used to replace the on-line faulty units. Furthermore a component failure may propagate through the grid and cause the whole system to fail if the failure is uncovered. Existing works on systems with warm standby spares and imperfect fault coverage are restricted to some special cases, such as assuming exponential failure time distribution for all components or only considering one spare. The BDD approach proposed in this paper can overcome the limitations of the existing approaches. Examples are shown to illustrate the application.