Security-based circuit breaker maintenance management

Circuit breakers play a vital role in maintaining system security since their malfunctioning could result in further component outages and may lead to the insecure operating conditions. This paper proposes a new approach for identifying the most risky circuit breakers using the condition-based monitoring data and security-based impact evaluations. For a given substation configuration, those circuit breakers which cause line outages due to mal-operation during contacts opening are identified and analyzed. The security oriented risk indices taking into account both voltage violations and overloading conditions as the consequence of circuit breaker mal-operations are proposed. A new breaker maintenance prioritization scheme based on the risk factors is elaborated. The proposed security-based risk framework is deemed to be an efficient approach in both breaker maintenance planning and identification of the breakers which are unreliable for reconfiguration plans. The presented methodology is investigated and verified on the IEEE 14-bus test system.