Simulated annealing heuristics for managing resources during planned outages at electric power plants

This paper presents a mathematical model and simulated annealing heuristics for assigning activities to workspaces and resources (e.g., equipment, parts, and toolboxes) to work/storage spaces during planned outages at electric power plants. These assignments are made such that the distance resources (toolboxes) travel throughout the duration of the outage is minimized. This problem is defined as the dynamic space allocation problem. To test the performance of the proposed techniques, a data set is generated and used in the analysis. The results show that the simulated annealing heuristics perform well with respect to solution quality and computational time.