Abstract An optimum maintenance plan for the protection systems of substations leads to improve the reliability while reducing the related costs. Reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) is one of the widely used strategies to obtain an optimal maintenance plan. An important issue in the protection systems is lack of a direct way between normal operation states of the pieces of equipment and their failure states, which is named “hidden function”. This hidden function of the equipment in the protection systems is the main issue challenging the implementation of RCM on such systems. Over-current protection systems are one of the main protection systems which are installed in the outgoing distribution feeders of substations. This paper presents a novel approach for the implementation of RCM on the over-current protection systems. The main advantage of the proposed approach is its global consideration of a protection system instead of only focusing on relays. The proposed approach has been applied on two different substations using real data of their over-current protection systems obtained from The Organization of Generation, Transmission, and Distribution Management of Electric Power in Iran (Tavanir). The results reveal a higher reliability and lower costs of the proposed maintenance plan in comparison with current maintenance plans.

中文翻译：

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一种在过流保护系统中应用以可靠性为中心的维护的新方法

摘要 变电站保护系统的优化维护方案可以在降低相关成本的同时提高可靠性。以可靠性为中心的维护 (RCM) 是获得最佳维护计划的广泛使用的策略之一。保护系统中的一个重要问题是在设备的正常运行状态与其故障状态之间缺乏直接的方式，这被称为“隐藏功能”。保护系统中设备的这种隐藏功能是挑战在此类系统上实施 RCM 的主要问题。过电流保护系统是安装在变电站出线配电馈线上的主要保护系统之一。本文提出了一种在过电流保护系统上实施 RCM 的新方法。所提出的方法的主要优点是它对保护系统的全局考虑，而不是只关注继电器。所提出的方法已应用于两个不同的变电站，使用从伊朗发电、输电和配电管理组织 (Tavanir) 获得的过流保护系统的真实数据。结果表明，与当前的维护计划相比，提议的维护计划具有更高的可靠性和更低的成本。和伊朗电力分配管理 (Tavanir)。结果表明，与当前的维护计划相比，提议的维护计划具有更高的可靠性和更低的成本。和伊朗电力分配管理 (Tavanir)。结果表明，与当前的维护计划相比，提议的维护计划具有更高的可靠性和更低的成本。