Optimal preventive maintenance budget setting for electric power distribution utilities

This paper proposes a practical method of preventive maintenance budget setting for electric power distribution utilities. Power system reliability mainly depends on preventive maintenance programs including types and frequency of selected maintenance activities controlled by maintenance budgets. In this paper, particle swarm optimization (PSO) is used to find the optimal budget settings in order to minimize the outage costs of electric utility customers. All of 10 distribution feeders at Bang-Wua (BWA) substation of the Provincial Electricity Authority of Thailand (PEA) are chosen to illustrate the proposed algorithm.