A RankBoost-Based Data-Driven Method to Determine Maintenance Priority of Circuit Breakers

Prioritizing equipment maintenance activities has been an important and challenging task in developing an equipment maintenance strategy for electric power utility companies. This paper presents a RankBoost-based data-driven approach for determining the maintenance priority of circuit breakers. Compared with conventional methods, the proposed method can consider both equipment-level condition-monitoring parameters and system-level reliability impacting indices, automatically create the rational weights among the multiple parameters/indices, and handle missing and invalid data. The simulation results based on the data of 33 circuit breakers indicate that the maintenance priority list obtained using the proposed method is closer to reality than the ranking lists obtained using a subjective weighting method or only using system-level reliability indices.