Long-Term Maintenance Scheduling and Budgeting in Electricity Distribution Systems Equipped With Automatic Switches

Abstract

Maintenance management, as a key part of the asset management practices, plays a vital role in enhancing the reliability of the electricity distribution systems (EDS) where realizing a highly reliable EDS is being attributed higher and higher criticality in today's modern society. In this paper, a new approach is proposed to improve the reliability of EDS through optimal scheduling of preventive maintenance (PM) tasks and allocation of automatic switches. The suggested objective for optimal PM schedules and switch allocation is to minimize a combination of customer-based (system average interruption duration index and system average interruption frequency index) and cost-based reliability indices. The total reliability cost includes those associated with the corrective maintenance actions, PM tasks, and automatic switch investments. The proposed approach is implemented in three different scenarios: 1) switch placement, 2) PM tasks scheduling and budget management, as well as 3) a joint switch and PM tasks decision making. The aforementioned scenarios are applied on a standard reliability test system (RBTS4) followed by multiple sensitivity analysis to further demonstrate the efficacy and performance of the proposed framework.