A Competitive Mechanism of Unit Maintenance Scheduling in a Deregulated Environment

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 (MBCs) 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 (SDs) 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 SD -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.