Dependability Evaluation of Data Center Power Infrastructures Considering Substation Switching Operations
Suellen Silva, Bruno Silva, Paulo Romero, Martins Maciel, Armin Zimmermann · 2014
Electrical power systems (EPS) are systems that include energy generation, transmission and distribution. One of the most important components of EPS corresponds to the electrical substation, which is utilized to control, modify, distribute and direct the electricity flow. The quality level of these systems is regulated by using Service Level Agreements (SLAs) which specify, for instance, maximum downtime per year. Penalties may apply if the quality level is not satisfied. On the other hand, fault tolerance techniques employ redundant equipment to increase the availability level of general systems, and the use of spare devices may incur additional infrastructure costs. Thus, to meet the SLA requirements, electrical system designers need to evaluate the dependability level of these systems. It is important to state that the use of software tools is suitable for dependability metrics evaluation, since it is not trivial to simulate or analyze complex systems. Modeling techniques with a strong mathematical background such as Stochastic Petri Nets (SPN) and Reliability Block Diagrams (RBD) can be adopted to assess dependability in power systems. This work proposes a methodology, which includes a hierarchical heterogeneous modeling technique that considers the advantages of both stochastic Petri nets (SPN) and reliability block diagrams (RBD) to evaluate data center power infrastructures considering substation switching operations. A case study is provided to demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed methodology.