Improvement of Supervision Schedules for Protective Systems

Improvement of supervision schedule is considered for protective-systems of multiple components. Each component is periodically supervised. Our improvement procedure consists of two steps. 1) Determine the time length of supervision and duration of successive supervisions which maximize the minimum point availability for simultaneous supervision schedule where all components are supervised simultaneously. 2) Improve the supervision schedule of Step 1 by constructing a staggered supervision schedule. In this schedule components are divided into subgroups, and supervisions of subgroups are staggered while components in the same subgroup are supervised simultaneously. A systematic method is given to optimize allocating components into subgroups for a specified number of subgroups and staggering of supervisions. An example illustrates the method.