Reliability assessment to determine the optimal forced outage rate of components

Determining the optimal forced outage rate (FOR) of components can lead to reducing the operational and maintenance costs in electric power systems. FOR is closely associated with two factors: number of outages and duration of outages. Therefore, it is possible to decrease the FOR through decreasing the number of outages or reducing the duration of outages. Decreasing number of outages is usually carried out through reinforcement of the network and reducing the duration of outages is mainly performed through increasing the repair and maintenance groups. Both of the proposed methods to decrease the FOR possess the costs. Therefore, it is very suitable to find the optimal rate of FOR and avoiding unnecessary costs. This paper presents a new methodology to find the optimal rate of FOR. in order to determining the optimal FOR of components, the system reliability is assessed and evaluated from view of FOR and the optimal rate of FOR is denoted for all components. EENS index is used to evaluate the system reliability. The simulation results show that the proposed method is an effective and suitable methodology to denote the optimal FOR of components and through this method, the unnecessary investment in the system can be eliminated. In this paper, the FOR of all lines are assessed to denoted the optimal rate of FOR. In additions, the superiority of the lines from view of reliability is denoted and important lines are introduced. A typical test system is considered and LOLE index is calculated for different FORs of all lines. Then, the optimal FOR of lines are determined as well as the impact of lines on the system reliability is investigated.