System Hardening and Condition-Based Maintenance for Electric Power Infrastructure Under Hurricane Effects

The devastating impact of hurricanes on electric power systems calls for development of sophisticated asset management strategies for utility infrastructure. El Niño/La Niña are shown to have seasonal effects on hurricane arrivals in the long-term climatological horizon. The periodic effects of such natural phenomena need to be analyzed and incorporated into decision making processes for strategic asset management of power systems. In this paper, an integrated infrastructure hardening and condition-based maintenance scheduling model for critical components of the power systems is proposed. Partially observable Markov decision processes are used to formulate the problem. The survival function against hurricanes is derived as a dynamic stress–strength model, and is incorporated in the proposed framework. A generalized formulation for two hardening strategies, i.e., with temporary and permanent hardening effects, is proposed. Case studies are conducted to analyze the model and further illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.