Planning power system outages with decision analysis modeling

Within the South African electricity supplier (Eskom) the outage scheduler working in the National Control department is responsible for sanctioning planned equipment outages on the interconnected power system. Currently this decision making process is not quantified. This work investigates the possibility of quantifying the decision by using decision analysis techniques. The decision analysis process suggested by Clemens is followed. A planned the outage situation is identified and deconstructed. With the use of reliability studies the failure probabilities are calculated and used in the decision model. The model is used to calculate expected values of the decision. Sensitivity analysis is used to identify which of the variables have the biggest impact on the decision. The conclusion of This work is that decision analysis techniques could greatly assist the outage scheduler, but for it to be useful, better faultfinding needs to be done to uncover the reasons for transmission line trips. By doing this the accuracy of the decision model would be vastly improved upon.