Improving predictive maintenance for HVDC transmission systems through analytic hierarchy process

摘要

Appropriate planning of maintenance activities is a very useful method for reducing operating costs and enhance power system's performance. High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) Transmission Systems contribute to the achievement of higher flexibility and increased transport capacity, their availability being therefore particularly important in today's global energy landscape. Given that HVDC schemes reached their expected lifetime quite recently, it is necessary to prioritize their subsystems with respect to performing maintenance activities, in order to minimize the unavailability time. This paper presents a hierarchical method based both on the assessment of the relative importance of the selected criteria against the established main objective and the considered subsystems on each criterion. Following Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) principle, an algorithm was developed in Matlab and applied to a HVDC transmission system, part of a case study. This led to obtaining the priority vector for its constituent subsystems regarding improved organization of the maintenance strategy.