Sharif Digital Repository

This paper investigates the effects of service quality regulation on investing in distribution automation. Among different regulatory instruments for quality regulation, the Reward-Penalty Scheme (RPS) has been selected to evaluate the effect of monetary incentive on behavior of Electric Distribution Utility (EDU) for service reliability. By implementing different automation strategies, the value of enhancing reliability indices and consequently the value of rewards and penalties are calculated for each strategy. For achieving to more realistic outcome, ten years horizon is considered. Furthermore, in the calculation of reliability indices, the time varying failure rate of components is... 

As a part of the ongoing debate about competition in the electricity industry, regulators are increasingly considering performance-based regulation (PBR) as an alternative to improve the service quality. The fundamental principle behind PBR is that good performance should lead to higher profits, and poor performance should result in lower profits. A penalty-reward structure (PRS) in a PBR mechanism can enhance utility performance to align utility interests with customer's interests. During the implementation of PBR, regulators should spend or receive money to reward good performed utilities or penalised poor performed utilities, respectively. A technique is proposed, in this study, to not... 

This paper investigates the effects of service quality regulation on investing in distribution automation. Among different regulatory instruments for quality regulation, the Reward-Penalty Scheme (RPS) has been selected to evaluate the effect of monetary incentive on behavior of Electric Distribution Utility (EDU) for service reliability. By implementing different automation strategies, the value of enhancing reliability indices and consequently the value of rewards and penalties are calculated for each strategy. For achieving to more realistic outcome, ten years horizon is considered. Furthermore, in the calculation of reliability indices, the time varying failure rate of components is... 

As a part of the ongoing debate about competition in the electricity industry, regulators are increasingly considering performance-based regulation (PBR) as an alternative to improve the service quality. The fundamental principle behind PBR is that good performance should lead to higher profits, and poor performance should result in lower profits. A penalty-reward structure (PRS) in a PBR mechanism can enhance utility performance to align utility interests with customer's interests. During the implementation of PBR, regulators should spend or receive money to reward good performed utilities or penalised poor performed utilities, respectively. A technique is proposed, in this study, to not... 

Demand response (DR) as a key integral part of the future smart grid is gaining a great and still growing focus of attention in nowadays electric power industries. However, many potential benefits of DR, although they have been envisioned to be significant, have not been yet thoroughly and quantitatively investigated. DR provides network operators with the opportunity to mitigate operational limit violations by load modification in place of load shedding when network reliability is jeopardised. This paper aims to comprehensively assess the potential impacts of DR on major attributes of service reliability in a residential distribution network. For doing so, firstly, load profiles for major... 

This study proposes an approach for improving service reliability in the distribution network based on establishing competition among electric distribution utilities. The idea behind this approach is to categorise the utilities and compare the performance of utilities located in one cluster with the other members of the same cluster. The reward/penalty mechanism (RPM) as a quality regulating instrument is designed for each cluster and used to penalise the utilities with a performance worse than the benchmark and to reward them for providing a performance better than the benchmark. Based on the RPM, utilities located in one cluster compete to make more profit by serving customers in better... 

This paper aims to quantitatively evaluate and compare the reliability impact of employing an automatic loop restoration scheme in a typical distribution system, with and without pulse closing technology. Sustained interruptions, momentary interruptions and voltage sags are the three major attributes of the service reliability that are taken into account in the reliability case studies  

This study proposes an approach for improving service reliability in the distribution network based on establishing competition among electric distribution utilities. The idea behind this approach is to categorise the utilities and compare the performance of utilities located in one cluster with the other members of the same cluster. The reward/penalty mechanism (RPM) as a quality regulating instrument is designed for each cluster and used to penalise the utilities with a performance worse than the benchmark and to reward them for providing a performance better than the benchmark. Based on the RPM, utilities located in one cluster compete to make more profit by serving customers in better... 

Despite of the great focus of attention dedicated to demand response (DR), the potential benefits of DR on distribution networks have not yet been quantitatively studied. This paper aims to assess DR potential impacts on major attributes of the operation of a residential distribution network. For doing so, grossly metered usage of more than 1600 residential consumers from Kainuu, Finland, is disaggregated to appliance-level load profiles. The flexibility of the load profiles is also estimated from the survey data and questionnaires. The individual profiles are then adjusted within their flexibility such that the most evenly distributed aggregated load profile is realized. Finally, the... 

This paper investigates the effects of service quality regulation on investing in distribution automation. Among different regulatory instruments for quality regulation, the Reward-Penalty Scheme (RPS) has been selected to evaluate the effect of monetary incentive on behavior of Electric Distribution Utility (EDU) for service reliability. By implementing different automation strategies, the value of enhancing reliability indices and consequently the value of rewards and penalties are calculated for each strategy. For achieving to more realistic outcome, ten years horizon is considered. Furthermore, in the calculation of reliability indices, the time varying failure rate of components is... 

This paper investigates the effects of service quality regulation on investing in distribution automation. Among different regulatory instruments for quality regulation, the Reward-Penalty Scheme (RPS) has been selected to evaluate the effect of monetary incentive on behavior of Electric Distribution Utility (EDU) for service reliability. By implementing different automation strategies, the value of enhancing reliability indices and consequently the value of rewards and penalties are calculated for each strategy. For achieving to more realistic outcome, ten years horizon is considered. Furthermore, in the calculation of reliability indices, the time varying failure rate of components is... 

Increasing redundant paths in transmission grids has always been thought to be a tool to enhance service reliability. However, network equations by intertwining power flows through redundant paths impose more limits on systems with more redundancy. Accordingly, autonomous removing of a few lines may relief capacity limit violations in some contingency events thereby enhancing service reliability. This paper aims to study impacts of manual removing of transmission lines on composite system reliability. For doing so, the existing model is extended to consider optimal transmission switching (OTS) as a remedial action. The model minimizes total damage cost imposed by load curtailments. The... 

Increasing redundant paths in transmission grids has always been thought to be a tool to enhance service reliability. However, network equations by intertwining power flows through redundant paths impose more limits on systems with more redundancy. Accordingly, autonomous removing of a few lines may relief capacity limit violations in some contingency events thereby enhancing service reliability. This paper aims to study impacts of manual removing of transmission lines on composite system reliability. For doing so, the existing model is extended to consider optimal transmission switching (OTS) as a remedial action. The model minimizes total damage cost imposed by load curtailments. The... 

Fault indicator (FI) plays a crucial rule in enhancing service reliability in distribution systems. This device brings substantial benefits for fault management procedure by speeding up fault location procedure. This paper intends to develop a new optimization model to optimally deploy FI in distribution systems. The proposed model aims to consider a tradeoff between the total customer interruption cost and FI relevant costs, including capital investment, installation, and maintenance costs. As the main contribution of this paper, the problem is formulated in mixed integer programing, which guarantees global optimum solution achieved in an effective runtime. Moreover, the model takes... 

In the past decade, enhancing the reliability of distribution networks by means of optimal switch placement has attracted much attention. In the case of failures in a distribution feeder, such disconnect switches will isolate the faulted section, and the customers downstream of the faulted point can be supplied by neighboring feeders through tie lines. Nevertheless, such reserve branches not only might experience failures themselves but also may not even exist prior to the switch placement. Accordingly, this paper presents a mathematical-programming-based model for the concurrent placement of disconnect switches and tie lines in the distribution networks to enhance the service reliability,... 

Embedded systems have migrated from special-purpose hardware to commodity hardware. These systems have also tended to Mixed-Criticality (MC) implementations, executing applications of different criticalities upon a shared platform. Multi-core processors, which are commonly used to design MC systems, bring out new challenges due to the process variations. Power and frequency asymmetry affects the predictability of embedded systems. In this work, variation-aware techniques are explored to not only improve the reliability of MC systems, but also aid the scheduling and energy saving of them. We leverage the core-to-core (C2C) variations to protect high-criticality tasks and provide full service... 

Due to the battery-operated nature of embedded Mixed-Criticality Systems, simultaneous energy and reliability management is a cru-cial issue in designing these systems. We propose two comprehensive schemes, MC-2S and MC-4S, which tolerate permanent faults through exploiting the inherent redundancy of multicore systems for applying standby-sparing technique and maintaining the system re-liability against transient faults with low energy overhead. In these schemes, two copies of each high-criticality task are scheduled on different cores to guarantee their timeliness in case of permanent fault occurrence. In order to guarantee the quality of service of low-criticality tasks, in the MC-2S... 

Distribution automation (DA) application for fault management in the electricity distribution networks is one of the main potential remedial actions to reduce customers' outage times and hence improve service reliability. As a result, various automation schemes have been developed and introduced in different countries and by different venders. The impacts of implementing a specific automation scheme on reliability indices of a given distribution system can be different from other available automation schemes. For this reason, when comparing the available automation schemes with each other or with the other reliability improvement measures, it is necessary to perform a course of reliability... 

With anticipated proliferation of electric vehicles and distributed generations in near future, dynamic thermal rating (DTR) as a tool for unlocking network capacities, is becoming critical for distribution network operators. DTR is gaining a great and still growing focus of attention in today's power industries. However, potential benefits of DTR, although have been envisioned to be significant, have not yet been studied quantitatively. This paper intends to comprehensively assess the potential impacts of DTR on the performance of a realistic Finnish distribution network. For doing so, first a step-by-step procedure is devised. Then, weather data and loading information of circuits in the... 

Distribution automation (DA) application for fault management in the electricity distribution networks is one of the main potential remedial actions to reduce customers' outage times and hence improve service reliability. As a result, various automation schemes have been developed and introduced in different countries and by different venders. The impacts of implementing a specific automation scheme on reliability indices of a given distribution system can be different from other available automation schemes. For this reason, when comparing the available automation schemes with each other or with the other reliability improvement measures, it is necessary to perform a course of reliability...