A DETERMINISTIC APPROACH TO GENERATION AND TRANSMISSION MAINTENANCE SCHEDULING WITH NETWORK CONSTRAINTS

Most unit maintenance scheduling packages consider the preventive main tenance schedule of generating units over a 1 or 2 year operational pl anning period in order to minimize the total operation cost while sati sfying system energy requirements and maintenance constraints. In a gl obal maintenance scheduling problem, we propose to consider transmissi on line maintenance scheduling in generation maintenance scheduling. T he inclusion of network constraints in generation unit maintenance wil l increase the complexity of the problem, so we propose to decompose t he global generator/transmission scheduling problem into a master prob lem and sub-problems using Benders decomposition. In the first stage, a master problem is solved to determine a solution for maintenance sch edule decision variables. In the second stage, sub-problems are solved to minimize operation costs while satisfying the network constraints. Benders cuts based on the solution of the sub-problem are introduced to the master problem for improving the existing solution. The iterati ve procedure continues until an optimal or near optimal solution is fo und. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Science S.A. All rights reserved.