A Competitive Mechanism of Unit Maintenance Scheduling in a Deregulated Environment

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel mechanism for unit maintenance scheduling (UMS) in the deregulated environment, based on the different functions of power producers and the independent system operator (ISO). The proposed scheme aims to achieve a tradeoff between ensuring the producers' benefits and maintaining the system reliability, providing satisfactory maintenance windows and cost-reflective reward/charge to individual producers.The proposed scheme has a three-step mechanism. Firstly, power producers have to evaluate the potential benefits of energy-selling profits versus maintenance costs and expected renewal costs for each available outage window, considering the impacts of unexpected unit failures. Based on the resultant costs/benefits, power producers will submit a set of maintenance bidding costs ( s) for its owned units to the ISO, indicating their preference of either continuous operating or maintenance outage during the corresponding periods. Subsequently, the ISO schedules their outage periods to attain a fine balance among the bidding costs, the satisfactory degrees ( s) of generating units and the possible load curtailment. Thirdly, as a nonprofit organization, the ISO has to settle the final expenditure of individual power producers in terms of an appropriate -based cost settlement method. The IEEE-RTS system is used to demonstrate the key features of the proposed mechanism in practical applications, including its fairness, simplicity and effectiveness.

A bidding mechanism for maintenance of generation units considering inter-ISO power exchange

“…In the case of the traditional regulated environment, the scheduling of the maintenance actions is managed by the power system operator. Then, the power producers are forced to perform maintenance actions according to the schedule defined by the operators [18]. In a deregulated environment, the GENCOs and the ISO are different entities.…”

“…Other coordination strategies for deregulated environments have also been studied in the literature. For example, in [18], a competitive bidding mechanism after maintenance planning is proposed. The goal is to balance the benefits of the GENCOs by considering the system reliability and the health condition of the generating units.…”

Generation maintenance scheduling based on multiple objectives and their relationship analysis

“…To obtain a coordinating GMS satisfying both the ISO and the producers, an interaction scheme between ISO and producers has been developed to generate and modify the maintenance schedule (Conejo et al, 2005;Barot and Bhattacharya, 2008;Feng and Wang, 2010). In Conejo et al (2005), a coordinating mechanism based on incentives/disincentives among producers and the ISO was proposed to encourage producers to modify their maintenance schedules in order to obtain an acceptable solution for both.…”

“…In Barot and Bhattacharya (2008), the security coordinated MS in restructured power systems was solved by an iteration scheme, in which the generation companies (GENCOs) altered their maintenance plans in specific periods according to the corrective signals generated by the ISO until a maintenance plan with no unserved energy was achieved. In Feng and Wang (2010), based on its resultant costs/benefits, each producer submitted the maintenance bidding costs for its owned units to ISO. Then the ISO scheduled the units' outage periods to attain a fine balance among the bidding costs, the satisfactory degrees of units, and the possible load curtailment.…”

Hybrid particle swarm optimization: Evolutionary programming approach for solving generation maintenance scheduling problem

“…A novel mechanism (Changyou and Xifan, 2010) for unit maintenance scheduling (UMS) in the deregulated environment, based on the different functions of power producers and the independent system operator (ISO). The proposed scheme aims to achieve a tradeoff between ensuring the producers' benefits and maintaining the system reliability, providing satisfactory maintenance windows and cost-reflective reward/charge to individual producers.…”