Integrated maintenance scheduling of generators and transmission lines based on fast group searching optimizer

This paper presents a new model for the integrated maintenance scheduling (IMS) of generators and transmission lines, which is formulated as a high dimensional, mix-integer and highly constrained optimization problem. The advantage of the new model is that the number of integer variables is greatly reduced in comparison with that in the traditional IMS model in a large scale power system. Besides, a fast group search optimizer (FGSO) algorithm is developed to solve the new IMS model, whose objective is to minimize the total costs of maintenance and power production. The effectiveness of the new model and the FGSO has been evaluated on the IEEE reliability test system. Simulation results show that the new model is successfully solved by FGSO and particle swarm optimizer (PSO). FGSO consumes much less time to find a near optimal solution and has better convergence performance in comparison with GSO and PSO.