A Robust Reliability-Based Maintenance Planning for Power Systems

Abstract

Power company operators have emphasized and used equipment maintenance planning concerning the increased number of worn-out equipment in power networks and limited resources to reduce the possibility and the risk of failure as one of the asset management tools. Reliability–based maintenance defines a comprehensive and optimal program for managing repair resources, determining dominant failure modes with failure mode and effect analysis, and selecting the time and strategy for each failure mode's repair. This paper proposes a suitable method based on a weighted reliability index for prioritizing the distribution network components to determine a robust reliability-based maintenance strategy at two levels. The first level introduces the robust reliability-based prioritization for power distribution station feeders and the robust reliability-based maintenance strategy prioritization for sample feeder components at the second level. Furthermore, this article presents a new method for optimal maintenance of distribution network components to improve the distribution network reliability by considering the cost. Moreover, this method presents a lifetime efficiency index model and an optimal bat algorithm method to achieve optimal maintenance for power transformers. The power transformer failure rate is simulated by a Weibull distribution function with a suitable approximation and the lifetime of the power transformer by carrying out maintenance, using the Taylor series in the Weibull distribution function in the MATLAB tool. The obtained results in terms of cost and response time compared to other methods show that the proposed method can obtain higher quality solutions than other studied methods for the problem of optimal maintenance.