Unit maintenance scheduling in electricity market environment considering transmission congestion

Along with power system deregulation, the traditional approach to unit maintenance scheduling (UMS) will be required to make some compatible changes for resolving some new problems to accord with the market mechanism. This paper proposes a sound method for the UMS within the market environment. A new mechanism driven by market is constructed for ensuring the competition fairness among generation companies (GENCOs). The proposed method is then applied to analyzing the UMS' impact on the system reliability at length, not only including the generation capacity adequacy, but also considering the transmission congestion. In addition, the allocation way about the ISO's income has been also discussed. A numerical example is used to show the effectiveness of the proposed method in practical applications. (6 pages)