MODELING THE INFLUENCE OF PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE ON PROTECTION SYSTEMRELIABILITY PERFORMANCE

Protection systems exhibit two important types of failures: failures t o operate and unwanted operations. Both failure modes have been introd uced in a model description designed for the evaluation of the influen ce of preventive maintenance on protection system reliability performa nce: The model description is constructed as a continuous time Markov chain. The system states and the transitions between states are genera ted in a general and systematic manner which makes it possible to appl y the model description to a lot of different situations. Through an e xample it is shown that (the quality) of preventive maintenance can ha ve significant influence upon the reliability performance of a given s ystem.