Implementation of reliability-centered maintenance for circuit breakers

Power system reliability is highly related to the way maintenance tasks on system equipment are performed. Time-based maintenance (TBM) has been practiced as the usual maintenance scheduling strategy in electrical energy systems for many years. While this approach has the advantage of simple scheduling and high availability, it is not the most cost effective. The objective of this project is to develop a generic decision support tool for maintenance of power circuit breakers based on the concept of reliability-centered maintenance (RCM). Reliability-centered maintenance not only considers the actual condition of a piece of equipment but also the relative importance of the equipment to the whole system and is expected to be more cost effective than the traditional approaches.