Strategic maintenance scheduling of distributed generations in oligopolistic electricity markets

This paper describes generation maintenance scheduling in an oligopolistic environment as a strategic decision. Maintenance decisions in an oligopolistic electricity market have a strategic function, because GENCOs usually have impacts on market prices through capacity outages. The main contribution of this paper is modeling a game theoretic framework to analyze strategic behaviors of GENCOs. Each GENCO tries to maximize its payoff by strategically making decisions, taking into account its rival GENCOs´ decisions. Some GENCOs own DG units, such as wind, diesel, biomass and fuel cell plants. Cournot-Nash equilibrium is used for decision making on maintenance problem in Oligopolistic electricity market. The Cournot-Nash problem is modeled as a mixed integer nonlinear programming optimization problem. The analytic framework presented in this paper enables joint assessment of maintenance and generation strategies.