EVALUATION OF RELIABILITY INDEXES AND OUTAGE COSTS IN DISTRIBUTION-SYSTEMS

Reliability evaluation of distribution systems assesses the adequacy o f the load points in regard to providing a suitable supply to customer s. This area has received increased interest during the past few years . A considerable number of papers have been published describing the d evelopment and application of the available techniques for modelling t he various features of a distribution system and for evaluating the re liability indices. Also a few publications have considered the evaluat ion of probability distributions of the reliability indices for radial systems. However, due to the complexity of the analysis and the need to consider overlapping outages in meshed networks, these techniques a re not able to evaluate the probability distributions for such network s. Also, further considerations are still required in the evaluation o f interruption costs/reliability worth in order to obtain true and mor e realistic values that reflect the behaviour of the system under stud y. This paper describes models and techniques for evaluating the proba bility distributions associated with the reliability indices in meshed networks. It also presents a procedure for combining costs of interru ptions with the probability distributions of interruption durations an d of CAIDI to assess the cost of interruptions in meshed networks. The proposed approaches are based on a combination of analytical techniqu es and Monte Carlo simulation. Finally the paper reports on the result s obtained from sensitivity studies developed for bus 1 of the IEEE Re liability Test System and called in this paper RTS-Bus 1 [1].