Maintenance management, as a key part of the asset management practices, plays a vital role in enhancing the reliability of the electricity distribution systems (EDS) where realizing a highly reliable EDS is being attributed higher and higher criticality in modern society. In this paper, a new approach is proposed to improve the reliability of EDS through optimal scheduling of preventive maintenance (PM) tasks and allocation of automatic switches. The suggested objective is to minimize a combined customer-based (SAIDI and SAIFI) and cost-based reliability indices. The total reliability cost (TRC) includes those associated with the corrective maintenance (CM) actions, PM tasks, and automatic switch investments. The proposed approach is implemented in three different scenarios: (1) switch placement, (2) PM tasks scheduling and budget management, as well as (3) a joint switch and PM tasks decision-making. The aforementioned scenarios are applied on a standard reliability test system (RBTS4) followed by multiple sensitivity analysis to further demonstrate the efficacy and performance of the proposed framework.

Maintenance management-as a part of the asset management policies-plays a vital role in enhancing the reliability of the electricity distribution system (EDS). The electric utility companies devote a considerable effort to allocate their financial resources to critical parts of the system, to achieve higher efficiencies. In this paper, a practical method is proposed for reliability-centered maintenance budgeting. The proposed method determines the optimal maintenance actions and their execution times in EDS feeders. The objective is to minimize the total reliability cost, including: the total customer interruption cost and total energy not supplied cost. Moreover, four cases are considered to explore the performance of the proposed maintenance method, including: the conventional EDS, the EDS equipped with remote-controlled switches (RCSs), maintenance budgeting and time allocation for the conventional EDS, and maintenance budgeting and time allocation for the EDS equipped with RCSs. The proposed reliability improvement approaches are applied to bus number two of the Roy Billinton test system, as well as a real scale distribution network followed by discussions on the obtained results.