Impacts of Automated Control Systems on Substation Reliability

Automation can significantly enhance substation reliability by speeding up service restoration. Although much research works has been done in reliability assessment of substation control systems, there are still several aspects that need to be considered in automated substation reliability evaluation. The impacts of automation system on substation reliability indices have not been comprehensively covered in the literature so far. This paper aims at presenting a comprehensive technique to quantitatively assess the reliability of the automated substations. The technique is based on the event tree methodology and the concepts of conditional probability technique. A step by step evaluation procedure is presented using a typical substation automation architecture known as simple star. The proposed technique is applied to some conventional substation configurations to examine the effectiveness of the technique and also to examine the level of reliability improvement achieved by automation. Furthermore, different sensitivity analyses have been carried out for both automatic switching action and a specific automated substation. The proposed strategy is easy to implement and suitable to analyze for an automated substation reliability with arbitrary automation architectures. Also, automated substation reliability assessment tools can be developed in detail, and can be catered to the specific needs of substation design.