Reliability assessment of power systems by Bayesian networks

This paper presents an application method of Bayesian networks (BN) to the reliability assessment of power systems. Bayesian networks provide a flexible framework to represent probabilistic information and to make inference on it. Uncertainty and dependency of the components' information in a system are easily incorporated in the analysis. The flexibility of the probabilistic inference algorithms in Bayesian networks permit to compute both the system's reliability indices and the mutual affection on reliability indices of all components. However, a BN cannot be constructed easily based on the topology of the relating power system. The paper gives a new method to construct a Bayesian network based on the assessed system's fault tree or its minimal path set. The method is efficient and can compute components failure probabilities on the condition of the system failure. Its advantages are demonstrated through two examples.