Reliability based maintenance programming by a new index for electrical distribution system components ranking

Reliability and accessibility of distribution systems are important goals that have significant impacts on the costs. The proper strategy of maintenance based on components arrangement and assets is the best way to reach these goals. This strategy is a kind of uses reliability-centered maintenance (RCM). Due to the limited maintenance budget, performing maintenance activities for all components of the system is neither possible nor logical. So most of the resources should be allocated to the most critical and important components. This paper presents a novel analytical method of prioritization of distribution systems’ components by introducing a new weighted cumulative Reliability-based diagnostic importance factor. This new factor includes different reliability indexes in form of diagnostic factors and will show that the order of components obtained by this method is better than another method in saving the budget and providing reliability of the system. The process of decision-making for prioritization of distribution systems’ components based on their criticality degree will both improve the reliability level of the total system and decrease the cost of load interruption and finally maintenance costs. The proposed model is implemented on a radial distribution network. Numerical results show the effectiveness of the proposed RCM model for micro-grids.