A new game theory-based solution methodology for generation maintenance strategy

A new maintenance scheduling of generating units (MSU) game in competitive electricity markets is presented to analyze strategic behaviors of generating companies (Gencos). The payoff of each player comprises the revenues from the energy auction market, production cost, maintenance cost, and risk loss over the horizon, which involves the compensation fee of interruptible load and the forced outage of generator. A simplified offer price methodology and a stochastic programming one are adopted to determine player's optimal bidding strategies for the day‐ahead market, whose trends of game result are similar. The maximal payoff of each Genco is obtained by tabu search algorithm. The solutions of non‐equilibrium, unique equilibrium, and multiple equilibria are coordinated. Numerical results for a two‐Genco system and a realistic system are used to illustrate the applicability of the proposed method. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.