A new multistage stochastic programming approach is developed by Dr. Zhouchun Huang for preventive maintenance scheduling of generation companies (GENCOs) with natural gas contract The research outcome is published in European Journal of Operational Research (EJOR). Rated 4* (the highest) in the ABS ranking list, the EJOR publishes high quality, original papers that contribute to the methodology of operational research (OR) and to the practice of decision making.

The abstract of the paper is copied below.

A preventive maintenance scheduling problem is studied on behalf of generation companies (GENCOs) with natural gas power plants, while taking into account their signed natural gas contracts and the opportunities of purchasing and selling natural gas in the spot market. This paper considers the uncertain prices of both natural gas and electricity in the spot market, and proposes a multistage stochastic mixed integer programming (MSMIP) model seeking the optimal operations regarding maintenance outage scheduling and natural gas trading. Large-scale MSMIP problems suffer not only the curse of dimensionality, but also computational difficulties with both discrete and continuous variables at each stage. To this respect, this paper leverages the progressive hedging algorithm based on scenario-based decomposition to solve large MSMIP problems. The solutions obtained from the algorithm exhibit promising quality under our numerical studies. Due to the independence among all the subproblems after the decomposition, the algorithm is amenable to parallel computing, which leads to faster convergence as demonstrated in the numerical results. Computational experiments also show that it is beneficial to use MSMIP while considering both maintenance planning and natural gas contracting. In addition, the results indicate the GENCOs with a larger number of small generators perform better than those with a smaller number of big generators.

If you are interested in the research, please read the paper

Zhouchun Huang and Qipeng Zheng. A Multistage Stochastic Programming Approach for Preventive Maintenance Scheduling of GENCOs with Natural Gas Contract [J]. European Journal of Operational Research, 2020.

A full version of this article could be viewed at:

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2020.03.036.