Composite system reliability assessment using dynamically directed Particle Swarm Optimization

This paper introduces a novel technique to evaluate composite system reliability indices using dynamically directed Binary Particle Swarm Optimization (BPSO). A key point in using BPSO in power system reliability evaluation lies in selecting the weighting factors associated with the objective function. Such weighting factors are, in fact, system dependent, thereby their appropriate values should be carefully selected in order to prevent the swarm from being trapped to one corner of the state space. In this context, the work presented here proposes a solution method to adjust such weighting factors in a dynamic fashion so that the swarm would always fly on the entire search space rather of being trapped to one corner of the search space. Therefore, in every single iteration, reliability indices are tackled and weighting factors are tuned up accordingly. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been demonstrated on the IEEE RTS. In this test case, it has been shown that the results obtained by the proposed method correspond closely to those obtained using Monte-Carlo simulation, while requiring lower computational burden.