Application of Benders’ decomposition to power plant preventive maintenance scheduling

Power plant preventive maintenance scheduling consists of knowing which generating units to take off line for regular safety inspection. This problem is extremely important because a failure in a power station may cause a general breakdown in an electric network. The principal danger is that customer electricity demand will not be satisfied in such cases. The problem is approached from the operations research perspective as a question of optimisation. Benders’ decomposition technique is used to solve the resulting model. An example of this application is included. The algorithm is put to use in a real power plant setting. The obtained result is a schedule that allows the efficient organisation of preventive maintenance over the time horizon considered.