Abstract
Fuzzy theory has been applied to the thermal power station generating unit maintenance scheduling problem to devise a new method where inherent uncertainty elements are represented appropriately. More specifically, this method uses fuzzy membership functions to represent load demand and supply reserve capacity for each given time interval within the maintenance period and the future years, respectively. The Branch and Bound method is used for the optimisation search.
The basic objective is to equalise the supply reserve capacity using fuzzy membership functions for load demand in the maintenance period, thereby obtaining and averaged value which contains the load's degree of uncertainty. In addtion, membership functions for load and reserve capacity are used to check future year reserve capacity levels to ensure that a given scheduling solution will allow future feasible solutions. To test the effectiveness of this method, simulations were run in tandem with a previously developed method which deals with load reserve capacity values deterministically. For the purpose of comparison, this deterministic approach is also briefly outlined in this paper. The results of these simulations are given in the Numerical Examples section.
