Reliability and availability performances of a universal and flexible power management system

This paper presents the results of the activities carried out by the authors within the European Project UNIFLEX-PM. The core of the activities dealt with the reliability and availability analysis of the new architecture proposed by the Consortium for a power management system to be used in the power distribution network. In particular, the contents of the paper address the analysis of the effects on system stochastic performances deriving from basic components wear-out phenomena, and the ones deriving from the adoption of different redundancy strategies and maintenance policies. Aim of these additional studies is to highlight the lack of a bottleneck from the dependability point of view, so paving the way toward the future development of an industrial product based on the new power converter architecture proposed and investigated during the project.