This study proposes an efficient formulation for maintenance planning of circuit breakers. The proposed formulation includes two main parts. In the first part a maintenance-dependent continuous-time Markov model is employed to model the stochastic deterioration process of individual components and determine the annual failure and maintenance costs of the circuit breaker. The circuit breakers differ in importance from the perspective of their position in the network. Hence, in the second part of this study an approximate method is proposed to consider the effect of the circuit breakers failures on the cost of the expected energy not served (EENS). Choosing different maintenance plans for each of the circuit breakers is not reasonable. Therefore this study proposes a ranking system to categorise the circuit breakers to several groups, according to their failure impact on the EENS cost. The proposed approach is implemented on the IEEE Reliability Test System. A comparison is made between the results of the proposed method and those reported by neglecting the circuit breaker location in the network. The obtained results show the efficiency of the proposed approach.

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