Scheduling maintenance for reliable transmission systems

This paper introduces an application of transmission switching in centralized transmission line maintenance scheduling while minimizing total operation cost of the system. The proposed model includes power balance equalities, power generation limits, voltage magnitude limits, ramp-up and down limits, unit minimum up and downtime limits, and power flow limits, and it benefits transmission companies and central dispatcher in terms of lower operation cost. An optimization process is formulated in terms of Mixed Integer Linear Programming. The effectiveness of central outage scheduling is tested with an IEEE model system, and significant cost savings are observed with the proposed model in comparison to a Business-As-Usual model.