ABSTRACT
This dissertation is primarily concerned with the generating plant maintenance scheduling problem of an electric utility in a developing environment as typified by the generating facilities of National Electric Power Authority (NEPA). The importance of this study lies in the fact that system reliability and operating cost of such electric utility are significantly affected by the adhoc maintenance philosophy adopted. There is the need to evolve an efficient maintenance policy aimed at optimizing system reliability and security. In this research effort, therefore, the maintenance scheduling problem has been recognised as an optmization problem with several constraints. Although the mathematical formulation is not altogether new, its application via existing optimizing algorithms to solve specific maintenance scheduling problem often requires some innovative assumptions to be made in order to generate realistic maintenance schedules. Herein, the Engineering assumptions and approximations made with respect to the maintenance problem at hand simplified the optimization problem proposed and led to the development of versatile software program. This technique has been applied to twenty eight generating units of NEPA, based on a scheduling horizon of one year and a maintenance period of one month. Several case studies were ran and the results obtained have been presented and fully discussed.