A Novel Method to Apply Reliability-Centered Maintenance on Over-Current Protection Systems

摘要

An optimum maintenance plan for the protection systems of substations leads to improve the reliability while reducing the related costs. Reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) is one of the widely used strategies to obtain an optimal maintenance plan. An important issue in the protection systems is lack of a direct way between normal operation states of the pieces of equipment and their failure states, which is named "hidden function". This hidden function of the equipment in the protection systems is the main issue challenging the implementation of RCM on such systems. Over-current protection systems are one of the main protection systems which are installed in the outgoing distribution feeders of substations. This paper presents a novel approach for the implementation of RCM on the over-current protection systems. The main advantage of the proposed approach is its global consideration of a protection system instead of only focusing on relays. The proposed approach has been applied on two different substations using real data of their over-current protection systems obtained from The Organization of Generation, Transmission, and Distribution Management of Electric Power in Iran (Tavanir). The results reveal a higher reliability and lower costs of the proposed maintenance plan in comparison with current maintenance plans.