Scheduling maintenance optimization of power systems using ant colonies

This paper addresses an ant colony meta-heuristic optimization method to solve a preventive maintenance (PM) problem for series–parallel system. In this work, we consider the situation where system and its components have several ranges of performance levels. Such systems are called multi-state systems (MSS). To enhance system availability (or reliability), possible schedule preventive maintenance actions are performed to equipments and affect strongly the effective age. The MSS measure is related to the ability of the system to satisfy the demand. The objective is to develop an algorithm to generate an optimal sequence of maintenance actions providing system working with the desired level of availability or (reliability) during its lifetime with minimal maintenance cost rate. To evaluate the multistate system availability, a fast method based on the universal moment generating function is suggested. The ant colony approach can be applied as an optimization technique and adapted to this PM optimization problem.