Condition assessment of circuit breakers (CBs) based on the installation of online monitoring systems (OLMs) is increasingly demanded by utilities. However, equipping all CBs with OLMs is neither technically nor economically feasible in a large power system. Therefore, the prioritization of the CBs is very important to identify critical components for equipping with such expensive tools (OLMs). The limited information along with the large size of power systems result in the inapplicability of the conventional ranking methods, in practice. To cope with this problem, this paper proposes a simple yet effective method based on the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) for organizing the experts’ knowledge. The prioritization of the CBs has been solved as a multi-criteria decision-making problem (MCDM). The proper criteria have been defined to incorporate the practical concerns and reliability points regarding the limited data in a large scale system. In addition, in order to avoid the inconsistency of the decision matrix, the problem has been divided into three-level, i.e. ranking of substations, CBs in each substation, and CBs in the network. The applicability of the approach has been verified through successful implementation in a large-scale power transmission network to determine the critical substations and CBs for equipping with OLMs.

公用事业越来越需要基于安装在线监测系统 (OLM) 对断路器 (CB) 进行状态评估。然而，在大型电力系统中，为所有 CB 配备 OLM 在技术上和经济上都不可行。因此，CB 的优先级对于确定配备此类昂贵工具 (OLM) 的关键组件非常重要。有限的信息以及大型电力系统导致传统排序方法在实践中不适用。针对这一问题，本文提出了一种基于层次分析法（AHP）的简单而有效的专家知识组织方法。CB 的优先级已作为多标准决策问题 (MCDM) 解决。已经定义了适当的标准，以结合关于大规模系统中有限数据的实际问题和可靠性点。另外，为了避免决策矩阵的不一致性，将问题分为三级，即变电站的排序、每个变电站的CB、网络中的CB。该方法的适用性已通过在大型输电网络中的成功实施得到验证，以确定配备 OLM 的关键变电站和 CB。