An optimum budget-based development in maintenance for electric power transmission networks

Abstract

On the topic of power systems, the most critical assignment would be providing facilities to make electricity available at the lowest price with a fulfilled level of reliability for all consumers. Today, power transmission reliability has received more concentration due to the increasing essence of providing high-quality energy to customers and operating competitive conditions in electricity markets. In this regard, this paper scrutinizes the reliability-centred maintenance (RCM) issue in terms of considering two optimal maintenance strategies for transmission assets to decrease their forced outage rate (FOR). This techno-economic budget-based maintenance is a probabilistic approach to help asset managers and experts in the decision-making process: to determine between maintenance strategies with associated costs and provide the most economical resource allocation for these elements, which leads to an improvement in the reliability of the whole network. Decreasing the average probability of Energy Not-Supplied (ENS), the simulation determined the proper maintenance strategy for transmission components. After that, the repercussions of the fallen ENS will be analyzed in total maintenance cost (MC), operation cost (OC), and the system's total cost (TC). Also, the IEEE 24-bus reliability test system is considered as a case study demonstrating the proposed technique's practicality.