In this paper, based on the definition of two-parameter joint entropy and the maximum entropy principle, a method was proposed to determine the prior distribution by using the maximum entropy method in the reliability evaluation of low-voltage
Keywords: prior distribution, maximum entropy, low-voltage switchgear, reliability evaluationCopyright © 2017 Universitas Ahmad Dahlan. All rights reserved.
IntroductionLow-voltage switchgear is responsible for power control, protection, measurement, transformation and distribution in low-voltage power supply system. For the reliability evaluation of low-voltage switchgear with high reliability and long life, traditional reliability assessment method needs to obtain sufficient data by a large number of sample life tests which is timeconsuming, costly and inefficient [1]. Therefore, the rational use of empirical and historical data to determine priori distribution can lay a solid theoretical foundation for the reliability evaluation of low-voltage switchgear.Bayes method can make good use of not only the field test information, but also priori information, such as historical test information, test information for similar models and the same type products with different conditions, and so on. And the priori information can be used to get the priori distribution which increases the failure data. This method has been applied in most fields, such as medical system [2], web [3], electrical engineering [4], finance [5], and speech recognition [6]. While, there is no discussion about low-voltage switchgear.In this paper, Bayes method is used to evaluate the reliability of low-voltage switchgear. The priori distribution of low-voltage switchgear is determined by maximum entropy method which avoids the introduction of other assumption information because of the using of priori information. According to maximum entropy principle, priori information can be taken as different contrains, and the optimal prior distribution can be selected by maximizing entropy under these constraints. The non-parametric bootstrap method is used to expand data capacity and then hyper-parameters of priori distribution is eatimated. Finally, with the bootstrap method, the prior distribution robustness and the posterior robustness is analyzed, and the posterior mean time between failures for the low-voltage switchgear is estimated.