Optimization of substation equipment maintenance by considering equipment deterioration

This paper presents the optimal maintenance rate of substation equipment. The equipment is modeled by multi-state Markov model which has the states of deterioration, maintenance and failure. However, this model is difficult to directly calculate the equipment availability. Therefore, it is necessary to reduce the states by using transition probability matrix. The minimal cut set method is employed to identify the equipment which causes system failure. Maintenance helps keep equipment in good condition, but it incurs the cost to substation owner. As a result, the method to find the optimal maintenance rate is proposed in this paper. A Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm is used to solve the objective problem.