Short-term transmission maintenance scheduling based on the Benders decomposition

Abstract

This paper proposes a modified Benders decomposition method to solve a new short-term transmission maintenance scheduling model in vertically integrated power systems. The model aims to minimize the maintenance cost and the expected cost of lost load. The random failures of transmission components and system reliability constraints are also considered. Since traditional heuristic algorithms cannot guarantee the global optimal solution for this mixed-integer nonlinear programming problem, the Benders decomposition is adopted despite some difficulties due to the problem features. Compared with that of generation maintenance scheduling, the specific difficulties of transmission maintenance scheduling are analyzed and several modifications are proposed to improve the convergence of the Benders decomposition. In addition, the influenced energy index is introduced to select the critical branches and reduce computational complexity in reliability evaluation as well. Numerical results of a test system demonstrate that the modified Benders decomposition method is highly efficient in arranging short-term transmission maintenance. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.