A novel approach for maintenance scheduling of generation units in restructured power system

This paper proposes a novel approach for maintenance scheduling of generation units in a competitive environment. In the restructured power systems, the objective function of the generation units is to maximize their benefit. In addition, the aim of the Independent System Operator (ISO) is to maximize the reliability throughout the year as much as possible. The main contribution of this paper is considering the condition of demand side in the Maintenance Scheduling (MS) of generation units and scheduling the outage windows of generation units to attain maximum Annual Social Welfare (ASW). In this scheme, unit maintenance scheduling is considered as a single-stage process instead of a repetitive and multi-stage process and authority of maintenance scheduling has been granted to the ISO. Broadly defined, independent operator system tries to maximize both ASW and units' annual benefit. This method is tested in bilateral energy market and the IEEE-RTS system is used as a system test to demonstrate the efficiency of proposed method. In this paper CLONAL Selection Algorithm is applied for finding the optimum maintenance scheduling of generation units.