Sensitivity of system reliability to component aging in metropolitan, urban, and rural areas

In power distribution systems, component reliability is the underlying driver of the overall system reliability. This paper illustrates how metropolitan, urban, and rural systems behave as their components age. A comprehensive reliability model is used to simulate system topologies for representative networks serving various service areas. By aging individual system components, the reliability indices, SAIFI and SAIDI, are computed utilizing an analytical simulation technique to realize their impact on system performance. Increasing component failure rates based on actual data are applied individually to determine sensitivity.