ISO Coordination of Generator Maintenance Scheduling in Competitive Electricity Markets using Simulated Annealing

To ensure that equipment outages do not directly impact the reliability of the ISO-controlled grid, market participants request permission and receive approval for planned outages from the independent system operator (ISO) in competitive electricity markets. In the face of major generation outages, the ISO will make a critical decision as regards the scheduling of the essential maintenance for myriads of generating units over a fixed planning horizon in accordance with security and adequacy assessments. Mainly, we are concerned with a fundamental framework for ISO's maintenance coordination in order to determine precedence of conflicting outages. Simulated annealing, a powerful, general-purpose optimization methodology suitable for real combinatorial search problems, is used. Generally, the ISO will put forward its best effort to adjust individual generator maintenance schedules according to the time preferences of each power generator (GENCO) by taking advantage of several factors such as installed capacity and relative weightings assigned to the GENCOs. Thus, computer testing on a four-GENCO model is conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and the applicability of the solution scheme to large-scale maintenance scheduling coordination problems.