Study effect of components availability on distribution system reliability through multilevel monte carlo method

Reliability model of a power distribution system is influenced by its components reliability and availability. The paper investigates the effect of some basic protection components availability on the distribution system reliability improvement. For this purpose, we use a new approach called multilevel Monte Carlo to speed up the conventional Monte Carlo simulation based reliability assessment. The proposed method is implemented through solving stochastic differential equations of the system components random failure process using Milstein discretization scheme. To illustrate the proposed method, two commonly used reliability indices are evaluated for a test distribution network.