Optimal outage scheduling: example of application to a large power system

In this paper, we are looking at an example of an application to the Ontario system of the newly developed models for measuring the impact of maintenance strategies on the system reliability and on the associated costs. We describe a maintenance model and associated computer software that looks at the chronology of maintenance requests and captures several important aspects of a large power system behavior. Specific situations involving maintenance and repair outages are considered. In order to measure the performance of a given maintenance request, a strategy based on incremental costs has been proposed. These costs account for variations in production, revenues and reliability caused by maintenance schedules. Although, they are all random variables, the emphasis is placed on the interruption costs, and loss of potential revenue, i.e. the reliability worth. An important contribution of this paper lies in the application of sophisticated reliability concepts to a large real power system.