Integrated maintenance scheduling system for electrical energy systems

In electrical energy systems, an essential part of their operation costs results from maintenance activities. Many applications discussing the task of reducing maintenance expenditure mainly aim at developing diagnostic techniques in order to avoid unnecessary maintenance activities. However, maintenance scheduling can only be done effectively if the condition of the whole power system is taken into account and system-specific aspects are considered besides device-specific information. The integrated maintenance scheduling system presented in this paper takes into consideration device and system-specific data in order to coordinate the maintenance activities for constrained maintenance schedules. Since, despite the restrictions, many different schedules can be generated, they are evaluated in order to find an optimal schedule concerning economic and utility dependent criteria. For this task, methods of evolutionary strategies and fuzzy decision theory are applied. In this way, the presented scheduling system supports the maintenance engineer to coordinate maintenance activities more effectively.