2018 15th International Conference on Electrical Engineering/Electronics, Computer, Telecommunications and Information Technology
Dynamic Programming Approach to Optimal
Maintenance Scheduling of Substation Equipment
Considering Life Cycle Cost and Reliability
Surawit Laohanan1 and David Banjerdpongchai2
Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Chulalongkorn University
254 Phayathai Road, Pathumwan, Bangkok 10330 Thailand
Email: 1lsurawit@gmail.com and 2bdavid@chula.ac.th
Abstract—Asset management of transmission system is an
essential issue for smart grid and condition monitoring system,
especially maintenance planning. Maintenance scheduling is the
most important part of asset management. The scheduling affects
the reliability of equipment, the reliability of substation system
and life cycle cost (LCC). Since the equipment in substation
hardly fails to operate, the information about failure is not yet
systematically recorded. This paper focuses on long term
maintenance based on available data of historical planning and
operation data. In particular, the Weibull distribution model is
used to estimate reliability function of equipment. A maintenance
planning may lead to different final condition of effective age of
equipment. We propose the optimal maintenance planning in
conjunction with the specified final condition of equipment and
compare the LCC and reliability. By using dynamic
programming (DP), the algorithm gives the minimum LCC while
satisfying reliability and final condition. Numerical results
demonstrate the effectiveness of the DP approach. Comparing
with the results using the genetic algorithm, the DP method
provides the maintenance planning with less LCC.
Keywords—Weibull distribution; maintenance scheduling;
reliability; life cycle cost; dynamic programming.
I. INTRODUCTION
According to statistical energy consumption of Thailand
during 2013 until 2016, the energy peak demand increased
from 25,598.14 to 29,618.80 [1]. It implies that the business
and industrial sectors of Thailand expand and continuously
grow. However, the major equipment in substation such as
power transformer and circuit breaker are operated over 25
years. The age of apparatus increases while the efficiency and
reliability decreases and affect the system operation. Many
utilities aim to plan and maintain assets especially transformer
and circuit breaker which are important and require high
investment. There is an important question when planners
should do maintenance for the considering period. If they do
many maintenances for equipment, the reliability and
performance of device improve and reduce chance of failure of
the equipment but the life cycle cost is definitely high due to
frequency of action. On the other hand, the less maintenance
reduces the reliability, and the cost is lower than that of the
frequent maintenance.
The trends of conditional monitoring are implemented to
smart substation for collecting and measuring
significant
978-1-5386-3555-1/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE
factors such as age, condition data, history of failure and
maintenance. These data are important for reliability analysis
and optimization of maintenance scheduling. Many previous
research articles could be classified into 4 groups. First, model
to evaluate the reliability of equipment employs the
exponential distribution [2] and normal distribution [3] using
historical data. Second, article [4] explains a decision of
maintenance model. Third, the life cycle costs of asset are
studied and classified [5]. Fourth, a method for solving
nonlinear function is described using different algorithm [4].
In this paper, we propose an algorithm to solve optimal
maintenance planning considering LCC and reliability for
substation. Furthermore, many actions could lead to a different
final condition of asset. The final condition constraint is
introduced to keep the suitable plan in the period.
II. ESTIMATING RELIABILITY OF EQUIPMENT
The reliability of equipment is necessary for planner to
make a decision for maintenance. Generally, planner should
collect the information such as statistical failure and frequency
of maintenance for analysis and predict. This section presents
a reliability of equipment which relates to definition and
application of Weibull distribution.
The Weibull distribution is a kind of uncertainty
distribution. Probability density function of Weibull
distribution is probability of effective age of equipment (Tef)
shown as follows.
β
β −1 §t ·
§ β ·§ t · −¨ ¸
©η ¹
f (t) = ¨ ¸¨ ¸ e (1)
© η ¹© η ¹
There are two parameters which describe the distribution
[6]. The first parameter is shape parameter or Beta parameter
(ߚ) which explains slope in the PDF. Moreover, it describes
characteristic of failure rate each equipment such as infant
morality, useful life period and wear out period in bathtub
curve. The other parameter is scale parameter of Eta parameter
(ߟ) which affects a change of x-axis scale of PDF and mean
time to failure of equipment. In order to find shape parameter
and scale parameter, the least squares method is applied to the
recorded failure data of existing equipment [7].
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2018 15th International Conference on Electrical Engineering/Electronics, Computer, Telecommunications and Information Technology

Weibull distribution can be applied to reliability and failure The term ߙ is an “improvement factor”. This factor is
rate of equipment which are described by following proposed by previous articles [8]. If ߙ = 0, the effective age of
equipment returns to a state of new equipment. While ߙ = 1,
1) Failure function (Q(t)) is a probability that the
maintenance do not have effect on the state of equipment.
equipment will fail at the operating time. The failure function
is cumulative distribution function (CDF) as follows. 3) Replacement (mi,j=0, ri,j=1). This action leads to
replacement of the new equipment. An effective age of
β −1
§t ·
−¨ ¸
equipment decreases to zero at start of the next stage and
©η ¹
Q (t ) = 1 − e (2) shows as follows.
2) Reliability function (R(t)) is defined as the probability § T ·
that the device will operate properly and is given as follows. t i , j +1 = ¨ t i , j + ¸ (1 − ri , j ) = 0 (7)
© n¹
β −1
§t·
−¨ ¸
©η ¹ IV. LIFE CYCLE COST MODEL
R (t ) = 1 − Q (t ) = e (3)
In this paper, the LCC could be classified into two types of
3) Failure rate function (ߣ(t)) is an indicator of the effect cost as follows. [2, 4]
aging on reliability of apparatus and is defined as follows.
1) Corrective maintenance cost. It can be called failure
β −1 cost (CF) which is caused by the inevitable or unplanned
§ β ·§ t ·
λ (t ) = ¨ ¸¨ ¸ ,β >1 (4) failure. This cost depends on the number of ith equipment
© η ¹© η ¹ failure which occur at jth stage as follows.

III. MAINTENANCE STRATEGY CFi , j = Fi (1 + d ) j N i , j (8)

In order to keep the reliability and operating performance of ti , j +1
each equipment, maintenance action has an impact on the Ni, j = ³ λi (t ) dt (9)
ti , j
effective age of operating equipment in positive and negative
reliability. A maintenance plan of a total of N equipment over where CFi,j is failure cost of ith equipment at jth stage (Baht)
the time T could be constructed by relationship between Fi is a unit failure cost of ith equipment (occ./Baht)
effective age and maintenance strategy. The parameters of d is an inflation rate (%)
maintenance are defined as follows. Ni,j is the number of failure of the ith equipment at jth stage
i is index of equipment (i =1,2,…,N) 2) Preventive maintenance cost. This cost has been
n is the number of intervals over the time T acummulated when the maintenance or replacement applied to
j is index of stage (j =1,2,…,n) equipment. This cost depends the decision action each
ti,j is effective age of the ith equipment of jth stage equipment and is classified into two costs as follows.
mi,j is a decision of maintenance for ith equipment of jth stage
ri,j is a decision of replacement for ith equipment of jth stage a) Maintenance cost: Maintenance cost (CM) is
occurred when maintenance strategy performed on the
The decision variables (mi,j, ri,j) are either 0 or 1. equipment and is shown as follows.
Maintenance action is related to the effective age at next CM i , j = M i (1 + d ) j mi , j (10)
stage and takes action to the ith equipment of jth stage.
Performing action could be classified into three types. where CMi,j is maintenance cost of ith device in jth stage
1) Do nothing (mi,j=0, ri,j=0). This action increases (Baht)
effective age of equipment at the start of next stage equals to Mi is a unit maintenance cost of ith device (occ./Baht)
effective age at the end of previous period and is given as b) Replacement cost: Replacement cost (CR) is a
follows. reinvestment cost of new equipment. Replacement cost is
defined as follows.
T
ti , j +1 = t i , j + (5) CRi , j = Pi (1 + d ) j ri , j (11)
n
2) Maintenance (mi,j=1, ri,j=0). This action purposely where CRi,j is replacement cost of ith equipment in jth stage
performs to maintain the equipment. The result of action (Baht)
decreases the effective age of equipment at start of next stage, Pi is a unit renew cost of ith equipment (occ./Baht)
however, the effective age is not reduced to be zero or the
same as the end of previous stage but it is defined as follows. V. OPTIMIZATION METHOD
This section presents the problem formulation and
§ T· describes dynamic programming technique to optimize
t i , j +1 = α i ¨ t i , j + ¸ mi , j , 0 < α i < 1 (6) maintenance scheduling.
© n¹

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A. Problem formulation ti , j §T ·
t i , j −1 = −¨ ¸ (19)
In this paper, the plan maintenance of one equipment is (1 − m i , j )(1 − ri , j ) + m i , j α i ©n¹
found in order to minimize the LCC under required reliability
condition. The objective function composes of total CF, CM When ri,j = 1, the state variable has many solutions. Then, ti,j-1
and CR for the total planning time and is given as follows. is determined to be the maximum value which satisfies (18). It
represents a worse condition of equipment. The proposed DP
n algorithm of optimal maintenance planning is given as follows.
(
TCDi = ¦ CFi , j + CM i , j + CRi , j ) (12)
j =1 Step 1: The optimal value at the first stage is given as follows.
The optimization problem is expressed as follows. V (ti ,1 ,1) = min
mi , j , ri , j ∈Ωi
{f i ,1 (ti ,1 , mi ,1 , ri ,1 )} (20)
min TCDi (13)
Step 2: The optimal solution of next stage is calculated by
subject to Bellman’s optimality principle for j = 2,..., n − 1 as follows.

1) Intial condition: ti ,1 = 0 (14) V (t i , j , j ) = min

mi , j , ri , j ∈Ωi
{f i, j
( g (ti , j −1 , mi , j −1 , ri , j −1 ), mi , j , ri , j ) + V ( ti , j −1 , j − 1) } (21)

2) Final condition: ti , n ≤ t D , f (15) Step 3: For j = n, the minimum cost is obtained as follows.
i

where t Di , f is the required condition of ith equipment at nth yi , n = min

mi , j , ri , j ∈Ωi
{f i ,n (ti , n , mi , n , ri , n ) + V ( ti , n −1 , n − 1) } (22)
stage
3) Effective age of equipment: j=2,…n Step 4: The decision variables at jth stage using the minimum
value and state variable ( ti , n ) in (22) for j = n,..., 2 are as
§ T · § § T ··
t i , j = (1 − m i , j −1 )(1 − ri , j −1 ) ¨ t i , j −1 + ¸ + mi , j −1 ¨ α i ¨ t i , j −1 + ¸ ¸ (16) follows.
© n¹ © © n ¹¹

4) Decision constraints: The action can be selected only

mi , j −1 , ri , j −1 = arg min
mi , j −1 , ri , j −1 ∈Ωi
{f i , j −1 ( g
−1
(t i, j
, mi , j , ri , j ) , mi , j −1 , ri , j −1 ) + V (t i, j , j )} (23)

one for ith equipment of jth stage

Step 5: At the first stage, the decision variables are as follows.
m i , j + ri , j ≤ 1 (17)
mi ,1 , ri ,1 = arg min { fi ,1 ( g −1
(t i,2
, mi , 2 , ri , 2 ) , mi ,1 , ri ,1 )} (24)
mi ,1 , ri ,1 ∈Ωi
5) Reliability constraints: The reliability of equipment
Ri , j is not less than the required reliability RDi , req .
VI. NUMERICAL EXAMPLE
Ri , j ≥ RDi , req (18) In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed
method, the historical data of effective age are used to model
We define ߗi as the set of decision variables that satisfy Weibull distribution and cost parameters are shown in Table I.
constraints (16), (17) and (18).
TABLE I. PARAMETERS FOR WEIBULL DISTRIBUTION AND COST EQUIPMENT.
B. Dynamic programming Circuit
Parameter Transformer
Dynamic programming (DP) was developed by R.E. breaker
Bellman [9] in the later 1950s. This method can generally solve Shape parameter (ߚ) 2.75 2.92
decision and control problem especially nonlinear optimization Scale parameter (ߟ) 21.32 31.37
problem. The DP method is to find the LCC minimizing for Failure cost of equipment (F) [Mbaht] 3.77 0.14
each stage as explains in Fig.1 and article [10]. Maintenance cost of equipment (M) [Mbaht] 1.885 0.07
Replacement cost of equipment (P) [Mbaht] 37.7 1.4
Inflation rate (d) [%] 2.5 2.5

A. Maintenance of equipment
The maintenance variables are defined as ߙ = 0.5, n = 20
Fig. 1. Schematic diagram of dynamic programming. and T = 20 years. The final condition of effective age is
specified as Table II. and reliability of equipment at the final
The variables used in DP are defined as follows. stage is larger than 0.9. To minimize the objective function
under constraints using dynamic programming, the results of
f i , j (ti , j , mi , j , ri , j ) = CFi , j + CM i , j + CRi , j timing and LCC are shown in Table II for transformer and
V (ti , j , j ) is a minimum cost of ith device of jth stage circuit breaker. The results show that when the final condition
of effective age is decreased, LCC and frequencies of
yi , n is the minimum cost (13) of ith device at nth stage
maintenance are increased. Moreover, both ߚ and ߟ are
g (ti , j −1 , mi , j −1 , ri , j −1 ) is a function of ti , j given in (16) affected by scheduling maintenance, reliability and failure rate.
−1 Therefore, the planning of different equipment is not similar.
g (ti , j , mi , j , ri , j ) is a an inverse function of ti , j −1 given as

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2018 15th International Conference on Electrical Engineering/Electronics, Computer, Telecommunications and Information Technology
TABLE II. OPTIMAL MAINTENANCE AND LCC OF SUBSTATION
EQUIPMENT USING DP METHOD.
Final
Transformer Circuit breaker
condition of
Timing of Timing of
effective age LCC LCC
maintenance maintenance
[year] [Mbaht] [Mbaht]
[year] [year]
9 6, 11, 15 8.8206 10, 17 0.2197
8 8, 12, 16 9.0328 12, 18 0.2291
7 8, 12, 18 9.3022 12, 20 0.2397
The optimal maintenance planning of transformer and circuit
breaker is illustrated in Fig 2. The figure shows that the optimal
maintenance plan gives satisfactory reliability. When the
maintenance is applied to the equipment, the reliability is
increased. It is due to that fact that the effective age of
equipment is reduced from maintenance strategy.
Fig 2. Comparison of reliability with different final condition
of transformer (top) and circuit breaker (bottom).
B. Comparison with geneteic algorithm (GA)
In this section, the results of DP are compared with that of
GA. GA is a kind of combinatorial optimization method for
solving optimization problem using biology concept. The
advantage is not using the calculus method such differential
technique to find the minimum value [11]. In our case, the
parameters of GA are chosen as follows. The number of initial
population = 500, the number of generation = 6000, probability
of crossover = 0.1 and probability of mutation = 0.9. The
results for different final effective age of transformer and
circuit breaker are presented in Table III. The results of DP
achieve the optimal solution while GA does not find the
optimal solution. The LCC of GA is greater than that of DP
ranging from 23-43% for transformer and 39-63 % for circuit
breaker. Comparing computational time between DP and GA
methods on CPU 2.40GHz, Core-i5, the average computation
time from DP is 30 minutes while GA takes more than 40
minutes to find solution. If the generation and initial population
increase more than 6000 and 500, GA gives the results closer
to that of DP but it takes much longer computational time. For
the problem with initial and final condition, GA does not
always give the optimal solution. Thus, DP is an efficient
method for solving combinatorial optimization, requires less
computational time and always achieves the optimal solution.
391
TABLE III. MAINTENANCE AND LCC OF SUBSTATION EQUIPMENT USING
GA METHOD.
Final Transformer Circuit breaker
condition of Timing of Timing of
LCC LCC
effective age maintenance maintenance
[Mbaht] [Mbaht]
[year] [year] [year]
9 3, 6, 13, 14 12.6858* 7, 13, 18 0.3054*
8 4, 6, 14, 17 11.1293* 2, 5, 14, 17 0.3746*
7 7, 13, 16, 19 11.9228* 13, 14, 19 0.3284*
Remark: *the effective age of equipment is lower than the
required condition as in the constraint (15).
VII. CONCLUSIONS
This paper presents an effective algorithm of optimal
maintenance planning considering LCC and reliability. The
probability of equipment is modeled by Weibull distribution
and is applied to find reliability and failure rate function.
Maintenance strategy can be classified into different actions
which impact on the effective age of equipment. The optimal
maintenance could be determined by DP. When the final
condition of effective age is decreased, the results are an
increased LCC cost and more maintenance activities.
Moreover, the reliability with different final effective age is
based on shape parameter and scale parameter of equipment
and leads to distinct maintenance plan. In addition, DP can find
the optimal solution of problem while GA depends on the
genetic parameter and the number of variables and sometimes
leads to local minimum solution.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
We are thankful for the research grant from Electricity
Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT).
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