A Novel Hybrid Symbiotic Organism Search for Solving Generator Maintenance Scheduling in a Power System

The generator maintenance scheduling (GMS) problem is a high-dimensional complex constrained non linear optimization problem that determines the schedule for carrying out planned preventive maintenance on generating units in a power system. Here, GMS is modelled from the perspective of vertically integrated utility system subject to different set of system and operational constraints. Over the last few decades, a number of solution techniques, including nature inspired algorithms, have been developed and proposed to solve this problem. In this paper, a new nature inspired algorithm; symbiotic organism search is proposed to solve the generator maintenance scheduling problem. To examine the efficiency of the proposed algorithm, two test systems, 4-units and 22-units system are considered. The simulation results are compared with that of other existing algorithms, which reveal that the proposed method has merit in terms of solution quality.