Outage planning of electrical power system networks using genetic algorithm

An electrical company is responsible for the maintenance of a transmission network of high voltage electricity. The maintenance schedule must be planned so as to minimize outage costs, taking into consideration various factors such as system security/reliability, system availability, and manpower utilization. With the rapid growth of organization, planning engineers are required to fulfill additional roles in order to increase productivity. To this end, a fast response and accurate mechanism is required to assist the planning engineers in dealing with the daily operation. This paper describes how a proposed maintenance schedule can be obtained automatically by the adoption of genetic algorithm. The main aim is to determine the maintenance schedule of circuit outage with minimizing the maintenance cost and maximizing the circuit availability under certain unavoidable system constraints. Further, an additional search mechanism called "final tuning search" is developed to enhance the system performance.