A budget allocation and programming-based RCM approach to improve the reliability of power distribution networks

Abstract

Reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) has recently emerged as a powerful tool to reasonably cut the operation and maintenance cost of power destruction systems, whilst meeting both power quality and reliability requirements. This study introduces a new RMC approach that allocates maintenance budgets based on component criticality and importance. A new diagnostic importance factor, implemented based on the criticality and importance of each component, is introduced as a new index for prioritizing components for maintenance activities and budget allocation. The process of budget allocation is carried out without using any optimization method and just by multiplying the maintenance budget by this newly designed factor. A multi-attribute decision-making technique (MAXIMAX) is considered to find the appropriate weighting coefficient of failure causes to reduce the effect of human dependency in the modeling failure rate of each component. Based on the priority and amount of budget allocated, a reliability-centered maintenance program for the sample distribution system is designed and implemented. The proposed RMC framework was implemented to a part of a distribution network in Iran to highlight its effectiveness and practicality. The obtained results showed an improvement in reliability indexes, which in turn confirms that prioritizing component criticality in budget allocation and maintenance programming enables reaching the reliability goals. Improvement in reliability indexes leads to maintenance cost reduction in future time intervals and efficient management of limited resources. A further comparison analysis with other approaches have shown that the proposed framework outperforms these methods in terms of speed, accuracy and budget allocation.