Power plant maintenance scheduling: optimizing economics and reliability

The objective of this study is to show the effects that costs, reliability, and constraints have on each other in power plant outage scheduling. A unique and powerful optimizing method is used to study data from a medium-sized utility. Four optimization studies were made. It was found that different optimization criteria give different best maintenance schedules. The optimal reliability and production cost values are coupled to operating constraints and may be improved by relaxing some constraints. The potential savings must be evaluated against the inconvenience and costs of relaxing these operating constraints. Use of an optimum maintenance schedule and judicious relaxation of constraints can lead to production cost reduction on the order of 0.3%. Integer programming can solve real-life maintenance-scheduling problems in reasonable computer time