A Holistic Framework for Supporting Maintenance and Asset Management Life Cycle Decisions for Power Systems

The outburst of population as well as increasing industrialisation have triggered a very prominent imbalance between electricity demand and supply in emerging economies such as Indonesia. Based on this premise, electricity generation and distribution firms such as Perusahaan Listrik Negara (PLN) are faced with an urgent need to enhance availability and reliability through capacity expansion as well as the institutionalisation of cost-effective maintenance and asset management (MAM) principles. Some of the principles recommended here involve embedding customised overall health index (OHI) and total life cycle cost (LCC) estimation principles into engineering decisions that relate to asset renewal and/or replacement. While discussions about the fundamental theories and estimation approaches for OHI and LCC for power transformers (PTs) already exist in the current body of literature, however, they are mostly in a generic form which has somewhat limited proper implementation of these valuable principles in practice. This study is unique because it provides a very systematic framework towards achieving cost-effective MAM through a case study. Additionally, the proposed framework is all-encompassing, as it also assesses the impacts of human unreliability through the application or proven risk assessment techniques. The proposed framework commences with the evaluation of existing decision support system at PLN through a MAM audit, whereby the performance of the West Java arm of PLN with regards to critical MAM elements was examined.