Priority assessment of online monitoring investment for power system circuit breakers: Part II: Determination of optimum number

The proper and reliable operation of circuit breakers (CBs) directly affects the reliability and continuity of electricity services in a power systems. Condition-based maintenance (CBM) is the best economic CB maintenance strategy through its online monitoring (OLM) possibilities. Since there is a large number of CBs in a power system, to equip all CBs with OLM systems is not economically justifiable however. This paper, as the second part of a two-part paper, presents an effective optimization framework to find the optimal number of CBs to be monitored online as the kernel of CBM process. To prove its feasibility, the proposed approach is applied to the IEEE Roy Billinton Test System, which includes 32 CBs. The impacts of interest rate and load interruption cost variations as well as nonoptimum selection of CBs for monitoring on the results are also discussed in this paper. The results of numerical analyses of the case study presented in this paper demonstrate how the proposed method can be employed for maintenance management of power system CBs.