LAUSR

This paper proposes a comprehensive bilevel model for the maintenance scheduling of power units including wind farms in a restructured environment. The maintenance-scheduling problem of generating companies (GENCOs) is constrained by technical and security constraints set by the independent system operator (ISO), who has the responsibility of operating the power system. To consider the impact of these constraints on the scheduling problem, we propose a bilevel approach with a strategic GENCO at the upper level and an ISO at the lower level. In the upper level, the scheduling problem considering the participation of wind farms is presented. The lower level, also called the ISO level, maximizes the social welfare with network security constraints. This bilevel problem is modeled as a mathematical program with equilibrium constraints (MPEC), which is then transformed into a mixed-integer linear problem through a linearization procedure. The resultant model is tested on the IEEE 24-Bus Reliability Test System considering various case studies to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. The results show that the proposed model can properly schedule the outages under different strict conditions preserving system’s security.