Availability Comparison of Various Power Substation Automation Architectures

This study aims at quantitatively assessing the availability indices of various substation automation systems. In order to illustrate the proposed technique, first, nine types of substation automation architectures are reviewed. The reliability block diagrams of various substation automation architectures are then developed. Subsequently, comparative studies are performed to demonstrate the most reliable architectures in comparison with the others. The results obtained by the proposed approach show the impact of repair on availability indices of the automation system. Finally, different sensitivity analyses are conducted for all architectures, where the impact of varying availability of all components on reliability indices of the automation system is illustrated.