Application of parameter-free genetic algorithm to outage planning for electric power facilities maintaining high power supply reliability

This paper presents a formulation of outage planning for electric power facilities treated as a combinatorial optimization problem considering power supply reliability. The indices are defined as power supply shortage assuming N-2 contingencies and transmission loss assuming N-1 contingencies. A lot of constraints are also introduced to this problem with respect to the allocation of outage works and the determination of system configurations. Since solving the problem is so hard due to combinatorial explosions, we apply a parameter-free genetic algorithm (PfGA) to obtain feasible solutions. The PfGA is unnecessary to adjust genetic parameters such as crossover and mutation rates. As a result, the PfGA contributes to improve the solutions compared with simple genetic algorithm (SGA).