RACalc - A power distribution reliability tool

One major objective of maintenance management activities in electrical distribution systems is to find the right level of investments. Within an MSc thesis project at KTH, the probabilistic reliability software RACalc has been developed to support the decision making in the distribution system maintenance planning and risk analysis. This paper describes the algorithms in RACalc and shows on present status on RADPOW, an additional reliability tool developed within the research group. Calculations with RACalc is in this paper exemplified with a case study on an existing Swedish distribution system, were the program is used to determine the components´ importance to the system reliability indices. The result show that if the failure rate can be decreased by 10% on the 21% most important components, the overall system reliability improvement is more than 7%.