The EURO ROADEF 2010 Challenge aimed to schedule the maintenance and refueling operations of French nuclear power plants, ranking the approaches in competition for the quality of primal solutions. This paper justifies the high quality of the best solutions computing dual bounds with dual heuristics. A first step designs several Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) relaxations with different compromises between computation time and quality of dual bounds. To deal with smaller MIPs, we prove how reductions in the number of time steps and scenarios can guarantee dual bounds for the whole problem of the Challenge. Several sets of dual bounds are computable, improving significantly the former best dual bounds of the literature. Intermediate results allow also a better understanding of the problem and offer perspectives to improve some approaches of the Challenge.
This section describes the solving approaches for the EURO ROADEF Challenge, focusing on the dual bounds possibilities. We refer to @cite_8 for a general survey on maintenance scheduling in the electricity industry, and to @cite_19 for a specialized review on the approaches for the 2010 EURO ROADEF Challenge.
@cite_19 @cite_8
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The EURO ROADEF 2010 Challenge aimed to schedule the maintenance and refueling operations of French nuclear power plants, ranking the approaches in competition for the quality of primal solutions. This paper justifies the high quality of the best solutions computing dual bounds with dual heuristics. A first step designs several Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) relaxations with different compromises between computation time and quality of dual bounds. To deal with smaller MIPs, we prove how reductions in the number of time steps and scenarios can guarantee dual bounds for the whole problem of the Challenge. Several sets of dual bounds are computable, improving significantly the former best dual bounds of the literature. Intermediate results allow also a better understanding of the problem and offer perspectives to improve some approaches of the Challenge. This paper presents a heuristic approach combining constraint satisfaction, local search and a constructive optimization algorithm for a large-scale energy management and maintenance scheduling problem. The methodology shows how to successfully combine and orchestrate different types of algorithms and to produce competitive results. We also propose an efficient way to scale the method for huge instances. A large part of the presented work was done to compete in the ROADEF EURO Challenge 2010, organized jointly by the ROADEF, EURO and Electricite de France. The numerical results obtained on official competition instances testify about the quality of the approach. The method achieves 3 out of 15 possible best results. We address the problem of planning outages of nuclear power plants submitted by EDF (Electricite De France) as the challenge EURO ROADEF 2010. As our team won the first prize of the contest in the senior category, our approach may be of interest: it is conceptually simple, easy to program and computationally relatively fast. We present both our method and some ideas to improve it. This paper addresses a large-scale power plant maintenance scheduling and production planning problem, which has been proposed by the ROADEF EURO Challenge 2010. We develop two lower bounds for the problem: a greedy heuristic and a flow network for which a minimum cost flow problem has to be solved. Furthermore, we present a solution approach that combines a constraint programming formulation of the problem with several heuristics. The problem is decomposed into an outage scheduling and a production planning phase. The first phase is solved by a constraint program, which additionally ensures the feasibility of the remaining problem. In the second phase we utilize a greedy heuristic--developed from our greedy lower bound--to assign production levels and refueling amounts for a given outage schedule. All proposed strategies are shown to be competitive in an experimental evaluation.