Maintenance of generation units coordinated with annual hydrothermal scheduling using a hybrid technique

This paper presents a hybrid technique for solving the generation maintenance scheduling coordinated with middle term hydrothermal dispatch based on the Chu-Beasley genetic algorithm and linear programming. It takes into consideration the non-linearity derived from the cost of the fuel for thermal power plants. The output of the genetic algorithm is a proposal for the start week of the generation maintenance plan that minimises the hydrothermal dispatch cost. This work has two main contributions: on one hand proposing a solution that integrates hydrothermal dispatch and maintenance scheduling in a single model, therefore a new mathematical model and, on the other hand the proposed solution applies a specialised genetic algorithm that has not been applied before to solve this problem. The test system to validate the methodology is composed of three hydro plants and two thermal plants split into 22 generation units, considering three types of preventive maintenance, in a planning term of one year (52 weeks). This methodology combines an exact technique and a specialised genetic algorithm, which favours convergence.