Composite Systems Reliability Evaluation Based on Monte Carlo Simulation and Cross-Entropy Methods

This paper proposes a new approach to evaluate loss of load indices in composite generation and transmission systems. The main idea is to combine a Cross-Entropy (CE)-based optimization process and nonsequential Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS) to obtain an auxiliary sampling distribution, which can minimize the variance of the reliability index estimators. This auxiliary sampling distribution will properly modify the original unavailabilities of both generation and transmission equipment, so that important failure events are sampled more often. As a result, the MCS algorithm can reach convergence faster and with fewer samples, leading to significant gains in computational performance, especially when dealing with very reliable system configurations. The proposed method is tested using several composite power systems, including the IEEE RTS 79, IEEE RTS 96, and a configuration of the Brazilian system.