Implementation of Reliability Centered Asset Management method on Power Systems

Abstract: Asset management is getting increasingly important in nearly all fields, especially inthe electric power engineering. It is mainly due to the following two reasons. First isthe high investment cost include the design cost, construction cost, equipment costand the high maintenance cost. Another reason is that there is always a high penaltyfee for the system operator if an interruption happened in the system. Besides, due tothe deregulation of electricity market in these years, the electricity utilities are payingmore attentions to the investment and maintenance cost. And one of their main goalsis to maximize the maintenance performance. So the challenge for the systems is toprovide high-reliability power to the customs and meanwhile be cost-effective for thesuppliers. Reliability Centered Asset Management (RCAM) is one of the bestmethods to solve this problem.The basic RCAM method is introduced first in this thesis. The model includes themaintenance strategy definition, the maintenance cost calculation and an optimizationmodel. Based on the basic model some improvements are added and a new model isproposed. The improvements include the new improvement maintenance strategy,increasing failure rate and a new objective function. The new model is also able toprovide a time-based maintenance plan.The simulation is done to a Swedish distribution system-Birka system by GAMS. Theresults and a sensitivity analysis is presented. A maintenance strategy for 58components and in 120 months is finally found. The impact on the changing failurerate is also shown for the whole peroid.