Reliability analysis of electrical power distribution system considering operational environment: A case study

The Electrical power distribution system is large, complex, and integrated. Failures occur more or less frequently. The consequences of failure are high cost of maintenance, increase health, environment and safety (HES) risk, and may result an undesirable effect on the power users, etc. Therefore in order to meet the established availability goals and customers requirements, it is very important to consider the reliability and maintainability of distribution system and its components. Reliability of distribution system is greatly affected by some environmental variables such as temperature, humidity, snow, icing, birds and insect activities, etc. Furthermore, power users are located in different place with different operational environment. It is means for specific component different performance can be expected. Furthermore, in a specific location the effects of environment condition can be change during the year and need to be considered as time dependent covariates. Therefore, to establish an appropriate maintenance policies the effect of these influence factors on reliability of distribution system must be identified and quantified. In this paper the effect of operational environments and location on the reliability of electrical power distribution is investigated using proportional hazard model.