Integrated decision algorithms for auto-steered electric transmission system asset management

Abstract

Electric power transmission systems are comprised of a large number of physical assets, including transmission lines, power transformers, and circuit breakers, that are capital-intensive, highly distributed, and may fail. Managing these assets under resource constraints requires equipment health monitoring integrated with system level decision-making to optimize a number of various operational, maintenance, and investment-related objectives. Industry processes to these ends have evolved ad-hoc over the years, and no systematic structures exist to coordinate the various decision problems. In this paper, we describe our progress in building a prototype structure for this purpose together with a software-hardware environment to deploy and test it. We particularly focus on the decision algorithms and the Benders approach we have taken to solve them in an integrated fashion. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.