New methods to assess the impact of maintenance and the condition of network components

This article deals with new methods to assess the impact of maintenance on the ageing behaviour of network components on the one hand and to assess their condition by usage of artificial neural networks on the other hand. For the first one, a new model - called m2M-model - based on heuristic knowledge (operational experience), previous failure occurrences and inspected damages with the ability to simulate the progression of an inspected damage to an occurred failure is introduced. An example of a circuit breaker demonstrates the resultant ageing behaviour in case of longer maintenance cycles. Additionally, artificial neural networks (ANN) will be introduced to specify the current condition of components. These networks will estimate the equipment condition, considering the information of maintenance protocols. In consequence, “expert knowledge” can be stored by training these artificial neural networks based on available data.