Scheduling Planned Maintenance of theSouth Wales Region of the

The maintenance of the high voltage electricity transmission network in England and Wales (the National Grid) is planned so as to minimise costs taking into account: location and size of demand for electricity, generator capacities and availabilities, electricity carrying capacity of the remainder of the network, i.e. that part not undergoing maintenance, resilience of the network to faults (contingencies). This complex optimisation and scheduling problem is currently performed manually (albeit with some computerised assistance). This paper reports recent work aiming to automatically generate low cost schedules using genetic algorithms (GA) using the South Wales region as a demonstration network. The combination of a \greedy optimiser' with a permutation GA, which has been demonstrated on a small network, was successfully applied to the South Wales network.