Two novel approximation methods of calculating the reliability Parameters of base-load power plants located in two independent weather conditions

In countries surrounded by areas with different weather conditions, such as Iran, using Markov method for calculating the reliability parameters, failure and repair rates, is not possible, due to large number of possible states. This paper introduces two new methods to calculate those parameters by approximation techniques. First method is based on eliminating of low likelihood events and using minimal cut set approach. Second method is much simpler but is appropriate for the cases containing two independent and almost similar weather conditions. In both methods, calculating the failure and repair rates is done with regards to both forced and scheduled maintenance outages.