Reliability/risk centered cost effective preventive maintenance planning of generating units

Purpose Finding the optimal maintenance schedules is the primitive aim of preventive maintenance scheduling (PMS) problem dealing with the objectives of reliability, risk and cost. Most of the earlier works in the literature have focused on PMS with the objectives of leveling reserves/risk/cost independently. Nevertheless, very few publications in the current literature tackle the multi-objective PMS model with simultaneous optimization of reliability, and economic perspectives. Since, the PMS problem is highly nonlinear and complex in nature, an appropriate optimization technique is necessary to solve the problem in hand. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach The complexity of the PMS problem in power systems necessitates a simple and robust optimization tool. This paper employs the modern meta-heuristic algorithm, namely, Ant Lion Optimizer (ALO) to obtain the optimal maintenance schedules for the PMS problem. In order to extract best compromise solution in the multi-objective solution space (reliability, risk and cost), a fuzzy decision-making mechanism is incorporated with ALO (FDMALO) for solving PMS. Findings As a first attempt, the best feasible maintenance schedules are obtained for PMS problem using FDMALO in the multi-objective solution space. The statistical measures are computed for the test systems which are compared with various meta-heuristic algorithms. The applicability of the algorithm for PMS problem is validated through statistical t-test. The statistical comparison and the t-test results reveal the superiority of ALO in achieving improved solution quality. The numerical and statistical results are encouraging and indicate the viability of the proposed ALO technique. Originality/value As a maiden attempt, FDMALO is used to solve the multi-objective PMS problem. This paper fills the gap in the literature by solving the PMS problem in the multi-objective framework, with the improved quality of the statistical indices.