High voltage switchgear is one of the most important control and protection equipments for reliable and stable operation of high-voltage power transmission system.In this study

a RBF（radial basis function）-based reliability assessment model of high-voltage switchgear was proposed according to common faults of high voltage switchgear.A self-developed intelligent prototype of 126 kV intelligent GIS was employed to verify the proposed model.Experimental results show that

compared with BP neural network

RBF neural network has better abilities of learning and classification

faster training speed

and lower error rate.The proposed RBF-based reliability assessment model is expected to be widely used in state assessment of high-voltage switchgear.