Unit maintenance scheduling coordination mechanism in electricity market environment

Along with worldwide electricity market deregulation, the traditional approach to unit maintenance scheduling (UMS) is required to make compatible changes for resolving some new challenges. The development of workable coordination mechanism to accord with the market mechanism is under the close concern of the policymaker, the market designer and the market participants. Actually, the key of this problem is both how to treat generation companies equally and how to guarantee the system security during the UMS process. This paper advances the view on UMS in electricity market environment, and identifies that the coordination fairness should include 'which plans to be selected for adjustment' and 'how to adjust them' simultaneously, of which only the former was comprehensively studied in the past research, however. To ensure the competition fairness thoroughly, a new kind of UMS mechanism with a coordination model is constructed. The transmission capacity constraint and the random line outage are involved in the model in order to make the analysis about the impact of UMS on the system security more reasonable. In addition, the adequate solution for this model and the allocation way about the independent system operator's income which is created during UMS process have also been discussed. Then the proposed mechanism is applied to a numerical example to show its good features in practical application.