a practical approach to planning reliability-centered maintenance in distribution system considering economic risk function and load uncertainty

Nowadays, power distribution companies are working in a competitive atmosphere. therefore, a major goal for electricity distribution managers is to provide electrical energy with a high reliability level with considering the economic issues. reliability-centered maintenance (rcm) is an efficient way of realizing this aim and improving a network’s maintenance processes. this approach is an operative step to improve the reliability of critical equipment and overall system performance which may reduce the costs of utilities. by using rcm, this paper provides a practical model for maintenance scheduling by considering the economic risk function and budget restrictions based on the cost of preventive maintenance (pm) and value of lost load (voll). in this method, pm schedules are proposed based on failure causes of different network elements. the studied elements include overhead lines, underground cables, and power switches (circuit breaker (cb), manual and remote control switches (rcss)). failure cause and average repair time of each element is determined through data mining in geographical information system (gis) and enox. for more realistic modeling and the consideration of the network loads’ uncertainties, the fuzzy triangular method is used. due to the inconsistency between the goals of the problem, the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (nsga ii) is employed. the results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.