Risk - based Maintenance Optimization for Transmission Equipment

This paper describes a new maintenance selection and scheduling approach for bulk transmission equipment that is based on the cumulative long-term risk caused by failure of each piece of equipment. This approach not only accounts for equipment failure probability and equipment damage, as do reliability centered maintenance (RCM) approaches, but it also accounts for the outage consequence in term of overload and voltage security in a rigorous and systematic way. In addition, the paper describes a rigorous method of computing equipment instantaneous failure probabilities based on time varying condition data. The method is illustrated on a 566-bus model of a US utility system.