Reliability and Vulnerability Assessment of Multi-Energy Systems: An Energy Hub Based Method

Multi-energy systems (MESs) make it possible to satisfy consumer's energy demand using multiple coupled energy infrastructures, thus increasing the reliability of the energy supply compared to separate energy systems (SESs). To accurately and efficiently assess and improve the reliability of MESs, this paper proposes a MES reliability and vulnerability assessment method using energy hub (EH) model. The energy conversion, transmission and storage in MESs are compactly and linearly described by EH model, making reliability and vulnerability assessment of MESs tractable. Indices for MES vulnerability assessment are proposed to find the key components for improving MES reliability. Multi-parametric linear programming (MPLP) with a self-adaptive critical region set is proposed to reduce the computational burden caused by iteratively solving LP problems for a large number of samples during the assessment process. The results of a case study show that the proposed reliability and vulnerability assessment method is able to effectively evaluate the energy supply reliability of different energy sectors in MES as well as find the critical component of an MES from reliability perspective to support its planning. The proposed algorithm, i.e., MPLP with a self-adaptive critical region set, can improve the computational efficiency by an order of magnitude compared to the traditional LP method.