Reliability-Centered Maintenance for Overhead Transmission Lines in Composite Power System

Reliable overhead transmission lines have a vital role in maintaining the reliability of power systems at a desirable level and ensuring the continuity of electrical energy. In this regard, a proper preventive maintenance program can ensure the reliable functioning of transmission lines. Based on the concept of reliability-centered maintenance, this paper proposes a preventive maintenance strategy that can be implemented in real power systems due to the limited data requirements. The priority of each line for preventive maintenance was obtained by two indices revealing the technical condition and importance of each line in the network. The proposed method was applied to a real transmission network in Khorasan province of Iran. In order to extract the condition index of lines, failure statistics during six recent years as well as technical data of lines were investigated. Moreover, this paper presents a two-stage method to determine the importance index of each line by evaluating the consequences of line failures on the network. The presented results show the efficiency of the proposed approach.