Asset Management and Condition Maintenance

The effectiveness of expending maintenance resources can vary dramatically depending on the target and timing of the maintenance activities. The state-of-the-art in maintenance management offers at least three basic approaches for making maintenance management decisions:
(1) condition-based maintenance (CBM) initiates a maintenance activity when datafrom equipment monitors indicates a need;
(2) reliability centered maintenance (RCM) prioritizes maintenance activities based on quantification of likelihood and consequence of equipment failures; and
(3) optimization techniques offer methods for maximizing effectiveness of the maintenance activities subject to constraints on economic resources, available maintenance crews, and restricted time intervals.

A comprehensive and cost-effective system-wide maintenance allocation and scheduling system

Based on automated integration of condition monitoring with an RCM-based optimized scheduler. The maintenance allocation and scheduling system can reduce maintenance costs while increasing equipment reliability. It can also (1) extend equipment life; (2) cut costs for substation design, refurbishment and construction; and (3) ensure high levels of health and safety for operation and maintenance personnel, the public, and the environment.

The effect of a specified maintenance task can be quantified basedon the cumulative reduction in system risk obtained from it.
1. Mid-term maintenance selection and scheduling: Algorithms and related software applications were created for selecting and scheduling transmission-related maintenancetasks over a budget and labor-constrained time period (e.g., a year) such that the effect ofthose resources are optimized.
2. Long-term maintenance scheduling: an approach for planning longterm policies associated with inspecting and maintaining power transformers and circuit breakers. Results of this approach serve to provide a list of candidate maintenance tasks as input to the mid-term scheduler.
3. Data integration: A novel data integration method created to avoid the need to aggregate data into a centralized warehouse but rather to allow users to query multiple, related data sources simultaneously.
4. Software design approach: Multiagent systems use messaging to facilitate communication between software applications, provide for long-term maintain ability of the software system, and are particularly effective when data and applications are highly distributed as they are in the asset management problem ..
abstracted from
PSERC FINAL PROJECT REPOET 2006
www.pserc.org