Application of Particle Swarm Optimization to the Reliability Centered Maintenance Method for Transmission Systems

Electric power transmission utilities make an effort to maximize profit by reducing their electricity supply and operation costs while maintaining their reliability. The development of maintenance strategies for aged components is one of the more effective ways to achieve this goal. The reliability centered approach is a key method in providing optimal maintenance strategies. It considers the tradeoffs between the upfront maintenance costs and the potential costs incurred by reliability losses. This paper discusses the application of the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) technique used to find the optimal maintenance strategy for a transmission component in order to achieve the minimum total expected cost composed of Generation Cost (GC), Maintenance Cost (MC), Repair Cost (RC) and Outage Cost (OC). Three components of a transmission system are considered: overhead lines, underground cables and insulators are considered. In regards to aged and aging component, a component state model that uses a modified Markov chain is proposed. A simulation has been performed on an IEEE 9-bus system. The results from this simulation are quite encouraging, and then the proposed approach will be useful in practical maintenance scheduling.