Reliability and Component Importance Analysis of All-Digital Protection Systems

Analysis of the importance of various components of the all-digital protection system is a key part of the system reliability quantification process. The importance analysis for all-digital protection systems was not covered in the literature so far. This paper investigates and selects two appropriate measures of the importance. The first is the Birnbaum´s measure used to identify the weak points of the all-digital protection system that needs to be improved if one is to improve overall system reliability. The second measure uses criticality importance to prioritize maintenance actions. To demonstrate the application of the proposed measures, this paper first introduces alternative architectures of all-digital protection systems. The associated reliability block diagrams as well as the exact system reliability are then given. Afterwards, the component importance for the alternative architectures is analyzed and discussed