Reliability evaluation of power systems with multi-state warm standby and multi-state performance sharing mechanism

With the increasing interconnection of the power grids, the imbalanced distribution between power generation and demand in different areas has been effectively alleviated. In practical power systems, the subsystems in different areas need to meet the load requirements of each subsystem, and the performance sharing among different subsystems is one way to increase system reliability. Moreover, each subsystem can be configured with redundancy techniques especially warm standby, which consumes less energy than hot standby and has a shorter recovery time than cold standby. Furthermore, both the generating units and the performance sharing mechanism may have more than binary states in practice. Therefore, in this paper, the reliability evaluation of power systems with multi-state warm standby and multi-state performance sharing mechanism is proposed. Arbitrary state transition time distributions are allowed, and the successful activation probabilities for warm standby generating units are also embedded in the proposed model. The multi-state decision diagram (MSDD) technique is developed for system reliability evaluation. Time-dependent reliability is presented in illustrative examples to validate the proposed model and technique.