Criticality Assessment of Transmission Assets Using a Node-Breaker Model

Transmission assets are regularly inspected and maintained to ensure their normal operation and to decrease the occurrence of unexpected failures. Compulsory outages need to be placed to take components out of service, in order to carry out maintenance. Transmission system operators (TSOs) must understand the criticality of transmission assets in terms of their failure impact on system operation and give priority to critical components maintenance when the maintenance activities are subjected to resource limits. This paper describes an approach for assessing the criticality of transmission assets using a node-breaker model, which is capable of accurately representing the operating system configuration. The proposed approach utilizes a node-breaker format contingency analysis to analyze the impact of components failure on system operating reliability. The criticality is quantified based on two performance indices that are computed based on the power flow solution in contingency analysis. The proposed approach is illustrated on a power system network operated by a major utility company in the Southwest United States. The results show the criticality of each transmission asset to system performance and demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach in realistic power systems.