A reliability based approach to transmission maintenance planning and its application in BC Hydro system

This paper presents a reliability-based method for transmission maintenance planning. A quantified impact assessment of the planned outage on the whole transmission system operation reliability is a main feature of the proposed method. This reliability centered maintenance (RCM) approach for transmission systems provides not only the lowest risk maintenance schedule but also the most reliable operation mode for the planned outage. Another feature of the method is ease of incorporation into the existing traditional transmission maintenance procedure. A time shift based Monte Carlo simulation technique and a linear programming optimization model are used to perform reliability evaluation of the transmission system with planned outage(s). An example for the planned replacement of a 230 kV cable in the BC Hydro North Metro system has been given to demonstrate a practical application of the proposed procedure and the method.