Reliability improvement is a fundamental issue in electric distribution network (EDN) operation. In this regard, providing the most efficient maintenance policy can dramatically assist the electric utility companies in reducing the failure rate of EDN components. In the present study, a novel probabilistic reliability‐centred maintenance (RCM) approach is proposed in which the reliability level of the EDN components are evaluated according to the three‐state Markov model (MM). Using the MM, this study presents a trade‐off between the corrective maintenance and the preventive maintenance (PM) actions and finally determines the precedence of EDN components in PM financial resource allocation. Through the method presented in this study, the financial resources of the PM are economically allocated with regards to economic parameters such as customer outage costs and budget constraints. The efficacy of the proposed RCM approach is evaluated through the implementation of the RCM approach on bus number four of the well‐known Roy Billinton test system.

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