Reliability of integrated electricity and gas supply system with performance substitution and sharing mechanisms

The reliability of a system that shares a single type of resource with others has been studied in the literature. In reality, a system may require different types of resources. For example, a building service system may be powered by electricity (for lighting) and gas (for heating). However, in the literature, research in this area is scarce. This paper therefore investigates the reliability of a system with multiple nodes. Each node has demand requirement for two types of resources, which can be shared among the system nodes subject to their bandwidths, respectively. In addition, the resources may be able to substitute each other. This paper considers both unidirectional and bidirectional substitutions. The system is said failed if either resource supply in a node is smaller than its demand even after performance substitution and sharing. A universal generating function technique is proposed to evaluate the system reliability. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate the applicability of the model. The influences of bandwidths and substitution rates on system reliability are also discussed.