Application of probabilistic health analysis in generating facilities maintenance scheduling

Preventive maintenance scheduling of generating facilities is an important requirement in generating system planning. Not conducting maintenance may enhance the ability to provide the available reserve in the short run, but will lead to higher generating unit failure rates which could create serious reserve shortages and decreased system reliability. A new technique designated as the health levelization technique is presented in this paper. This technique is a hybrid approach, which incorporates a deterministic criterion within a probabilistic framework. In the studies described in this paper, the probability of health is determined using the capacity of the largest unit. The maintenance schedules obtained using the health levelization technique is more responsive than the schedules obtained using the reserve levelization approach as it has the capability to incorporate many of the uncertainties that exist in the process. Deterministic techniques can create maintenance plans that satisfy the approved deterministic criteria. They can also create situations in some weeks in which there is excessive system risk due to the fact that the deterministic techniques do not involve any consideration of the actual risk