Coordination of Generation Maintenance Scheduling in Electricity Markets

Generation maintenance scheduling (GMS) plays an important role in power system operations. The restructuring of the power industry has forced changes to the traditional maintenance mechanism. On one hand, the generation companies seek to maximize their profit. On the other hand, the independent system operator (ISO) strives to maintain the operational reliability of the system while maximizing the social welfare. This paper proposes a coordination mechanism for generation maintenance scheduling in electricity markets. In order to solve the resulting large mixed integer programming (MIP) problem, a relaxation induced algorithm is utilized. This technique is based on the solution of the linear relaxed problem. The features of the coordination mechanism and the performance of the algorithm are demonstrated using the IEEE-118 bus system and a provincial power system in China. Case studies show that the proposed mechanism not only ensures the maintenance preference of the generating companies, but also maintains the operational reliability of the system. They also demonstrate that the algorithm is quite efficient at solving the optimization problem.