Reliability-Based Preventive Maintenance of Oil Circuit Breaker subject to Competing Failure Processes

This paper investigates technical and organizational tools to improve performances of a multi-state degraded system subject to multiple competing failure processes. The competing failure processes treated in this paper are oil insulating aging and electrical contacts wear out of high voltage oil circuit breaker. To degradation processes, is associated random shocks process highlighted by the stresses due to shortcircuit solicitations. To keep a high level of circuit breaker reliability, two policies are developed and cover reliability increasing of the downstream feeder and reliability based preventive maintenance of the item. The first policy is developed using technical and organizational measures, while the second policy is based on improvement factors method optimizing availability under threshold reliability and a maximum benefit. The results obtained using a case study allow the decision maker to reach better information, to target the equipment that reduces the performances of the system, and to practice suitable maintenance actions.