Project planning and controlling maintenance overhaul of power-generating units

The purpose of this article is to introduce techniques to plan and manage maintenance overhaul of power-generating units. It is based on a case study conducted in a thermal power-generating plant where bar-chart scheduling was the planning method. The overhaul activity network was made up of many parallel networks and paths. This characteristic of the network allowed for greater flexibility in resource scheduling. Hence, it was possible to develop an efficient resource mix profile for the project. Special attention was given to ‘management by sub-projects’, which would allow use of low memory computers. It was seen that management by sub-projects yielded reasonably good results. Besides, sub-project management was found to be very conducive to overall project control. Slippage charts were drawn at the rescheduling stage, and slippage could be identified to a sub-project, then to the sub-network and finally to the cause. This enabled the managers to halt project slippage.