Multi-state system reliability analysis of HVDC transmission systems using matrix-based system reliability method

Abstract This paper presents a new reliability analysis method for High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) transmission systems based on the Matrix-Based System Reliability method. The proposed method can compute the failure probability of HVDC transmission systems by use of efficient matrix-based procedures. Unlike conventional system reliability methods whose practicability strongly depends on the system size and the complexity of its multiple states, the proposed method can describe any general system event in a simple matrix form and therefore provides a straightforward way of handling the system events and estimating their probabilities. The main qualities of the proposed method are demonstrated by the reliability assessment of two multi-terminal HVDC (MTDC) transmission systems with multiple derated states. The performance of the proposed method and the results obtained were compared with two traditional assessment methods: Capacity Outage Probability Table (COPT) and Monte Carlo simulation. In this comparative analysis it is shown that the proposed method is a competitive alternative for reliability analysis of MTDC systems in terms of simplicity and efficiency.