An optimization model for evaluating the economic impact of availability and maintenance notions during the synthesis and design of a power plant

•A MINLP optimization strategy for a NGCC power plant is introduced.•The state-space method is used for identifying availability characteristics.•Influence of maintenance funds on each component's repair rate is directly assessed.•Impact of designer-adopted characteristics is thoroughly analyzed.•Accurate and detailed estimations are obtained for the expected economic performance.

In this paper, we introduce an optimization strategy in order to comprehensively quantify the impact of availability and maintenance notions during the early stages of synthesis and design of a new natural gas combined cycle power plant. A detailed state-space approach is thoroughly discussed, where influence of maintenance funds on each component's repair rate is directly assessed.In this context, analysis of the reliability characteristics of the system is centered at two designer-adopted parameters, which largely influence the obtained results: the number of components which may fail independently at the same time, and the number of simultaneous failure/repair events.Then, optimal solutions are evaluated as the availability-related parameters and the amount of resources assigned for maintenance actions are varied across a wide range of feasible values, which enable obtaining more accurate and detailed estimations of the expected economic performance for the project when compared with traditional economic evaluation approaches.