This paper introduces a three-phase heuristic approach for a large-scale energy management and maintenance scheduling problem. The problem is concerned with scheduling maintenance and refueling for nuclear power plants up to five years into the future, while handling a number of scenarios for future demand and prices. The goal is to minimize the expected total production costs. The first phase ...

As the world looks ahead to the next generation of space exploration programs, we must focus on designing architectures for both sustainability and affordability. By viewing exploration programs as a “system-of-systems,” we can focus on reducing costs through the use of flexible, reusable infrastructures to support various aspects of manned and unmanned spaceflight. This paper addresses one key...

A methodology is presented for tackling mixed-integer nonlinear optimization problems by local search, in particular large-scale real-life problems. This methodology is illustrated through the localsearch heuristic implemented for solving an energy management problem posed by the EDF company in the context of the ROADEF/EURO Challenge 2010, an international competition of applied optimization. ...

LOTUS reactor - a compact lead-cooled fast is currently being studied to generate 200 MWth of capacity and operate for 20 years without refueling the floating nuclear power plant (FNPP) application. Therefore, it would be big advantage achieve long operation refueling. However, small usually has higher neutron leakage, good reflector essential maintain economy. The main objective selecting pote...