Preventive maintenance scheduling of multi-cogeneration plants using integer programming

Maintenance scheduling of cogeneration plants, which produce both electric power and desalinated water, is a typical complex process with long-term operations and planning problems. The plants' maintenance scheduling process has to determine the appropriate schedule for preventive maintenance, while satisfying all the system constraints and maintaining adequate system availability. It is an optimization problem and the maintenance and system constraints include the crew constraint, maintenance window constraint and time limitation constraint. In this paper, an integer linear-programming model, which has been developed, is described which schedules the preventive maintenance tasks in a multi-cogeneration plant. Results of a test example of such a plant situated in Kuwait are presented to show the applicability of the approach.