Maintenance Scheduling of Thermal Power Units in Electricity Market

– The objective of this paper is to present a decision-based function to determine the optimal maintenance scheduling strategy of thermal power units taking into account the particular obligations of Generation Company, such as bilateral contracts. Opportunities for energy selling at the electricity market as well as a detailed modeling of the power plants are considered in the optimization problem. The deterministic constrained combinatorial optimization problem that considers maximization of profit is solved using the interior point cutting plane method. This method possesses the advantages of both, the interior point method and the cutting plane method, and becomes very promising approach for the large-scale discrete optimization problem. Furthermore, in order to improve the robustness and efficiency of this method, a new general optimal base identification method is developed and introduced to deal with various types of optimal solutions. The implementation and performances of proposed solution technique are presented. The effectiveness of the approach is tested on the realistic size case study, and numerical results are demonstrated and discussed. Key-Words: – Maintenance scheduling; electricity market; bilateral contracts; market prices, interior point cutting plane method, optimal base identification method.