Reliability Evaluation of Smart Microgrids Considering Cyber Failures and Disturbances under Various Cyber Network Topologies and Distributed Generation’s Scenarios

Abstract

Smart microgrids (SMGs), as cyber–physical systems, are essential parts of smart grids. The SMGs’ cyber networks facilitate efficient system operation. However, cyber failures and interferences might adversely affect the SMGs. The available studies about SMGs have paid less attention to SMGs’ cyber–physical features compared to other subjects. Although a few current research works have studied the cyber impacts on SMGs’ reliability, there is a research gap about reliability evaluation simultaneously concerning all cyber failures and interferences under various cyber network topologies and renewable distributions scenarios. This article aims to fill such a gap by developing a new Monte Carlo simulation-based reliability assessment method considering cyber elements’ failures, data/information transmission errors, and routing errors under various cyber network topologies. Considering the microgrid control center (MGCC) faults in comparion to other failures and interferences is one of the major contributions of this study. The reliability evaluation of SMGs under various cyber network topologies, particularly based on an MGCC’s redundancy, highlights this research’s advantages. Moreover, studying the interactions of uncertainties for cyber systems and distributed generations (DGs) under various DG scenarios is another contribution. The proposed method is applied to a test system using actual historical data. The comparative test results illustrate the advantages of the proposed method.