Scheduling Planned Maintenance of the National Grid

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. This complex optimization and scheduling problem is currently performed manually (computerised viability checks can be performed after the schedule has been produced). This paper reports work aiming to automatically generate low cost schedules using genetic algorithms (GA). So far: { A small demonstration problem has been identiied, { A tness function has been devised, { To date work has concentrated upon devising a representation based upon \greedy optimizers", which combine permutation GAs with scheduling heuristics, { The best of these heuristics has been incorporated in the QGAME genetic algorithm programming environment and optimal solutions have been readily found.