A Novel Approach to Investigate the Effect of Maintenance on the Replacement Time for Transformers

An approach to link maintenance and replacement decisions is presented in this paper. This approach proposes a methodical decision-making system to determine the optimal time to replace equipment. It essentially investigates the cost-effectiveness of replacing the equipment both before and after the lifetime is extended by maintenance. To properly investigate the effect of maintenance, maintenance activities should first be scheduled effectively. Therefore, this approach introduces a maintenance strategy based on reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) concept and genetic algorithm (GA) to optimally schedule maintenance activities. Two replacement studies are conducted: with and without the effect of maintenance. A comparison between replacement studies is discussed in the proposed approach. The proposed approach is applied to one of the most critical pieces of equipment in power systems: power transformer.