MILP Formulations for Generator Maintenance Scheduling in Hydropower Systems

Maintenance activities help prevent costly generator breakdowns but because generators under maintenance are typically unavailable, the impact of maintenance schedules is significant and their cost must be accounted for when planning maintenance. In this paper, we address the generator maintenance scheduling problem in hydropower systems. We propose a mixed-integer programming model that considers the time windows of the maintenance activities, as well as the nonlinearities and disjunctions of the hydroelectric production functions. Because the resulting model is hard to solve, we also propose an extended formulation, a set reduction approach that uses logical conditions for excluding unnecessary set elements from the model, and valid inequalities. We performed computational experiments using a variety of instances adapted from a real hydropower system in Canada, and the extended formulation with set reduction achieved the best results in terms of computational time and optimality gap.