A Comparative Study of Maintenance Scheduling Methods for Small Utilities

This paper presents a comparative study of a few commonly used maintenance scheduling methods for small utilities that consists solely of thermal generating plants. Two deterministic methods and a stochastic method are examined. The deterministic methods employ the leveling of reserve capacity criterion, of which one uses a heuristic rule to level the deterministic equivalent load obtained by using the product of the unit capacity and its corresponding forced outage rate. The stochastic method simulates the leveling of risk criterion by using the peak load carry capacity of available units. The results indicate that for the size and type of the maintenance scheduling problem described In this study, the stochastic method does not produce a schedule which is significantly better than the deterministic methods.