A Healer Reinforcement Approach to Smart Grid Self-Healing by Redundancy Improvement

Smart Grid is expected to heal the electricity distribution system to improve its reliability, known as self-healing capability. Self-healing can be performed in system level (like restoration and local generation), in component level, or by reinforcing the healer system reinforcement (called as healer healing). Smart Grid literature chiefly focuses on the two former approaches; while, the latter has gained less attention despite merit. A proper healer reinforcement method is expanding redundancy, in both control and protection subsystems. The redundancy expansion and the consequent self-healed distribution network is anticipated to express lower outage times, thus higher reliability and increased social welfare. This paper investigates the effect of redundancy expansion on reinforcement of the Smart Grid healer, by reliability modeling of protection and control subsystems. The positive effect of the proposed healer reinforcement approach on the overall Smart Grid reliability is shown on RBTS4, and the results are discussed then.