Long-term maintenance scheduling of smart distribution system through a PSO-TS algorithm

Asset management of distribution systems is an important issue for smart grid. Maintenance scheduling, as an important part of asset management, affects the reliability of distribution equipment and power supply. This research focuses on long-term distribution system maintenance scheduling aided by available operation information, which is a prominent advantage of smart grid over conventional distribution systems. In this paper, the historical and future operation information in smart grid is taken into account through a decoupled time-varying reliability model of equipment. Based on distribution system reliability assessment, a maintenance scheduling model is proposed to determine the optimal implementation time of maintenance activities to minimize distribution systems' total cost, while satisfying reliability requirements. A combined algorithm that consists of particle swarm optimization and tabu search is designed and applied to the optimization problem. Numerical result verifies that the proposed method can schedule long-term maintenance of distribution systems in smart grid economically and effectively.