Optimized maintenance scheduling considering customer sensitivity to service interruptions

Regular grid maintenance work might cause service interruption and consequently result in the economic loss of electricity end-use consumers. In order to maintain the service quality each utility tries to minimize customers' economic losses due to the monthly maintenance work. This paper firstly proposed an evaluation model to quantity the customer sensitivity to service interruption such that customers with different sensitivity values are compensated by different electricity loss price. The sensitivity value is calculated considering four variations: the average loading level, the customer importance level, the request for non-interrupted services and the historic customer complaint information. After then an optimal model solved by mix integer programming (MIP)method is proposed to minimize the total electricity loss cost due to power outage during the maintenance work. It can be obtained from the case simulation results that the economic loss of customers due to the maintenance work has been reduced after applying the optimization method to the maintenance scheduling.