Reduced Tree Search for Optimal Preventive Maintenance of Generating Facilities

The problem of preventive maintenance (pm) scheduling is to find the intervals and the sequence in which the generating facilities are to go pm in a specified time period so that the cost of maintenance is minimized. This paper formulates the pm problem under practical constraints and generates solution vectors as branches of a tree. Termination rules avoid generating a large number of solution vectors, and the optimal solution is obtained quickly.