While the nation's economic and social well-being continues to become increasingly dependent on the nation's electric energy systems, continued reliable performance of those systems must be maintained despite increasing financial and operating constraints. The task of maintaining acceptable levels of' reliability is made increasingly difficult by the lack of' analytical tools for reliability evaluation which are powerful enough to handle svstems of such existing and growing size and complexity in an effective, convenient and flexible mliniier. Existing approaches are essentially deterniinistic Lind @id hoc, while proposed analytic approaches, deterministic or probabilistic, ire computationally infeasible. We propose a new, analvtic, probabilistic approach which overcomes these difficulties. This approach builds on work done elsewhere on svstem effectiveness analysis for electric energy systems, and work done by the proposers, under EPRI sponsorship, on application of adjoint network based sensitivity techniques to electric energy svstem security assessment. The proposed technique would provide to svstem planners, for the first time, a convenient tool for niacroscopic reliability evaluation ol' projected systems.The potential commercial application as described by the awardee: While the electric utillty industry is necessarily conservative in its engineering, it has never hesitated to adopt credible new analytical tools. The superiority and powers of the technique we proposed, once demonstrated, would attract wide interest and usage.
