Electricity Distribution System Maintenance Budgeting: A Reliability-Centered Approach

Maintenance management—as a part of the asset management policies—plays a vital role in enhancing the reliability of the electricity distribution system (EDS). The electric utility companies devote a considerable effort to allocate their financial resources to critical parts of the system, to achieve higher efficiencies. In this paper, a practical method is proposed for reliability-centered maintenance budgeting. The proposed method determines the optimal maintenance actions and their execution times in EDS feeders. The objective is to minimize the total reliability cost, including: the total customer interruption cost and total energy not supplied cost. Moreover, four cases are considered to explore the performance of the proposed maintenance method, including: the conventional EDS, the EDS equipped with remote-controlled switches (RCSs), maintenance budgeting and time allocation for the conventional EDS, and maintenance budgeting and time allocation for the EDS equipped with RCSs. The proposed reliability improvement approaches are applied to bus number two of the Roy Billinton test system, as well as a real scale distribution network followed by discussions on the obtained results.