Economic Dispatch of a Differential Evolution Based Generator Maintenance Scheduling of a Power System

This paper presents generator maintenance scheduling (GMS) and economic dispatch (ED) of the Indonesian power system based on minimization of an economic cost function for the economical and reliable operation of a power system, while satisfying crew/manpower, maintenance window, load demand, generation limits and spinning reserve constraints. Differential evolution (DE), an evolutionary computation technique and an optimization algorithm that utilizes the differential information to guide its further search, is known to effectively solve large scale optimization problems and has been widely applied in power system. In this paper, the DE approach is proposed for solving the GMS problem and the resulting optimal maintenance schedules are used by the Lambda-iteration (LI) method to calculate the ED for the 19 generating units supplying power to two major industrial parks located in Bintan and Batam in Indonesian. The simulation results show great prospect for application in control centers by solving GMS and ED problems of many utilities which seek to minimize running costs. The results obtained offer an effective alternative for solving the GMS and ED problems.