Reliability assessment of distribution network considering preventive maintenance

Maintenance strategy impacts the reliability of distribution network directly. Common distribution network maintenance strategies contain corrective maintenance and preventive maintenance. However, the existing reliability assessment methods ignore the effects of preventive maintenance. This study showed the influence of preventive maintenance on the system failure rate by describing the preventive maintenance strategy with a reliability function and proposed a reliability evaluation method considering preventive maintenance of the distribution network. The method adopted the Sequential Monte Carlo method to simulate changes of elements lifetime and the operation condition of distribution network elements and used two kinds of clocks to simulate the state change and the reliability of elements respectively. The proposed method was used to evaluate the reliability of IEEE RBTS BUS6 system with preventive maintenance strategy. Finally, the effects of reliability threshold on the frequency and cost of maintenance and distribution network reliability index were analyzed. A reasonable range of reliability threshold is given.