Reliability evaluation of electrical systems with switching actions

The paper presents a new approach for comparing the reliability of different designs for electrical systems with switching actions; this switching taking place following a fault in the system. An efficient program to evaluate the failure modes of each load point and its associated reliability indices has been developed. Also a concept of system minimal cutsets is introduced to assess the overall system-reliability indices. This is a powerful concept for systems that have many load points and also those that have a single overall objective. It permits comparison of the reliability between systems that are different in design, although meeting all the operating requirements. The program incorporates this technique and was used to obtain the results presented in the paper.