Reliability Modeling and Evaluation of Reparable Electrical Power Supply Systems using Reliability Block Diagram

This paper deals with reliability modeling and evaluation of reparable electrical power supply systems. The proposed methods are Reliability Block Diagram (RBD), Minimal Cut Sets (MCS) and Importance factors. These methods ensure quantitative and qualitative analysis of reliability. The MCS are deduced using minimal paths method. Furthermore, various importance factors namely: Birnbaum Importance, Inspection Importance and Fussell-Vesely Importance are applied to identify the most important electric components in the system. The proposed methods are programmed using Matlab software and applied on a Nuclear Power Plant's (NPP) electrical power supply system model. They are validated through the comparison of their results to those obtained by Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) method using RiskSpectrumPSA software. The comparison shows that the results obtained by the proposed methods are very close to those obtained by FTA.