Evaluation of Operational Risk in Power Substations and Its Rational Reduction on the Basis of Multicriteria Allocating Resources

The present work aimed at improving the quality of operational risk estimation for power substations and increasing the efficiency in its reduction using models and methods of multicriteria decision-making. The application of the proposed methodology allows one to assess, compare, prioritize, and/or order power substations from the point of view of operational risks and to rationally allocate available resources to reduce operational risks. It is presented a method of Systemic Risk Assessment (SRA) that integrates concepts of risk assessment and multicriteria decision-making techniques. The use of SRA permits one to take into account expert opinions to obtain the operational risk estimates. These estimates serve for allocating resources between substations within the framework of multicriteria models. The analysis is based on applying the Bellman-Zadeh approach to decision-making in a fuzzy environment to solve multicriteria problems and provide their harmonious solutions. The risk assessment results of the three power substations show that the power substation (PS)2 has the highest risk level (0.314), followed by PS1 (0.267), and PS3 (0.199), and the allocation of financial resources between the substations is the following: PS1: R $\$ $ 465,000.00, PS2: R $\$ $ 1,714,339.00 and PS3: R $\$ $ 820,661.00. The Case Study, demonstrates the possibility of reducing the subjectivity of the risk evaluation and the improvement of the quality of the decisions made in resource allocation.