Application of common cause analysis for assessment of reliability of power systems

The term common cause failure is related to a fact that several components can fail or become unavailable due to a particular cause of failure and a coupling mechanism that creates the condition for multiple components to be affected by the same cause. The objective of this paper is to investigate the feasibility of common cause analysis to an electric power system, its applicability, the most appropriate method and the effects of the results to the reliability of the power system, where the static conditions are assumed. The method for assessment of reliability of power systems is developed, which is based on the fault tree analysis and which integrates the common cause analysis. The results of example studies shows that the method is suitable for reliability analysis of power systems and for improvement of power systems such as their upgrade in optimized manner and for optimization of their maintenance with minimizing the costs.