Cleaning versus replacement in power plant air preheaters: a comparison between deterministic and stochastic goal programming models

Power plants lose efficiency when the air preheater elements are not replaced or cleaned as they deteriorate. Replacing is more expensive than cleaning but more secure to preserve power and lifetime. How many baskets should be then replaced and how many cleaned to achieve ‘satisficing’ goals of cost, power and lifetime? We design deterministic/stochastic goal programming approaches to this problem and develop a decision case for usual preheaters. Some discrepancies in results between both approaches appear, the deterministic model advising to replace fewer baskets than the stochastic, which is plausible due to the risk variable.