Production and maintenance planning for electricity generators: Modeling and application to Indian power systems

This paper describes the development of an optimization model to perform the fuel supply, electricity generation, generator maintenance, and inter-regional transmission planning for the Northern Regional Electricity Board (NREB) of India. A review of the existing planning process of NREB revealed several areas of potential improvement. In the past, NREB did not use optimization and/or probabilistic methods in their planning. Their decision-making on maintenance, generation and fuel allocation was being performed in a sequential and ‘fragmented’ fashion, ignoring the possibility of interaction between the generation, transmission, and fuel supply subsystems. The deterministic treatment of outages of generators, and the planning criterion of spreading demand shortfall uniformly across the regions, were other areas of potential improvement. An integrated model, using linear programming together with a heuristic, has been developed to perform joint decision-making on fuel supply, maintenance, generation, and transmission. Monte Carlo simulation is used to incorporate the random outages of generators. The model has been prototyped using GAMS language together with a spreadsheet interface, and implemented for the NREB system. Substantial reduction in system costs is envisaged based on the results of a case study. The model is expected to aid the complex decision-making process of NREB planning engineers in several important ways.