Towards the development of an appropriate regulation mechanism for maintenance scheduling of generating units in electricity market environment

The problem of determining an appropriate maintenance scheduling (MS) for generating units in the electricity market environment is quite different from that in the traditional power industry. The traditional approach for this employed by the system operator through a centralized optimization method does not match with the electricity market operation mechanism, while security and reliability problems could be arisen if the MS is determined by individual generation companies. With this in mind, it is very demanding to develop an appropriate market mechanism for regulating or coordinating the MS proposed by individual generation companies so as to maintain the security and reliability of the power system operation, while at the same time, to guarantee the fairness among all generation companies involved. An effort is made for this purpose by requiring generation companies to submit both their MS and their willingness-to-pay for keeping their MS not being adjusted by the system operator such as the ISO. The proposed mechanism could well achieve the given two objectives, i.e. maintaining the security and reliability of power system operation as well as guaranteeing the fairness among generation companies. Finally, a numerical example is served for illustrating the essential feature of the proposed mechanism.