An ant colony optimization solution to the integrated generation and transmission maintenance scheduling problem

The integrated maintenance scheduling considers transmission line maintenance scheduling in generation maintenance scheduling. The inclusion of network constraints increases the complexity of the above scheduling problem. Ant colony optimization (ACO) is a metaheuristic in which a colony of artificial ants cooperate in finding good solutions to difficult optimization problems. This paper proposes an ant colony optimization-based approach to the unified maintenance scheduling problem of power generation and transmission systems. Results from the application of the proposed method on the IEEE 30 bus system demonstrate the feasibility and practicality of this approach.