Dependability Analysis of Smart Distribution Grid Architectures Considering Various Failure Modes

Abstract

The future smart distribution grid will be consisting of new components and technologies with enhanced capability whose failure behaviour can not be determined with certainty. In studying the reliability of these distribution grids, it is important to look into various possible failure semantics of the new components and how would they possibly affect the reliability of the distribution grid. This paper aims to investigate/study how the various failure modes of the new components affect the reliability of distribution grids. The focus is on (limited to) reliability evaluation of the feeder protection function of next generation distribution grids considering omission and value type failure semantics. A generic and modular modeling framework based on a stochastic activity networks is used to model the distribution grid. An IEC61850 based automation/substation communication network (SCN) is considered. And, for illustration, different scenarios with different SCN architectures are investigated.