Power outage planning

This paper is concerned with scheduling the planned electric power outage in a region where the expected demand for power exceeds the expected supply, during some interval of the year. To minimize the total economic loss of the power shortage, the best allocation of power outage among the consumers is determined. A hierarchical planning system is proposed to find the optimal solution with two levels of aggregation. The first step in this system is to determine the outage duration for each consumer in the shortage season, in order to minimize the total economic loss. In the second step, a disaggregate model determines when, and for how long, the power of a consumer will be cut off during a shortage season. Linear and mixed integer programming are used, respectively, to develop the aggregate as well as the disaggregate models. A hueristic algorithm is developed to solve the problem, practically. Some results of the model are also discussed.