Section: Bilateral Contracts and Grants with Industry

Contract with EDF on robust maintenance planning

We are currently working on a project aiming to plan the energy production and the maintenance breaks for a set of nuclear power plants generating electricity. We consider the large-scale power plant maintenance scheduling and production planning problem submitted by EDF to the 2010 Euro/Roadef Challenge. Two types of power plants are used to satisfy a customer demand over a specific time horizon. Type 1 plants can operate continuously while Type 2 plants have to be shut down regularly for refuelling and maintenance, and cannot produce during outage periods. The decision to be made consists of the dates of outages, the amount of refuel for Type 2 plants, and production level for both types of plants. The objective is to minimize the average cost of refuelling and production on various demand scenarios. We previously developed a column generation approach based on extended formulation which enables to solve within a few minutes a deterministic instance of the problem, which is within the time frame of the operational tools currently used by EDF. We now investigate stochastic and robust versions of the problem, where the duration of maintenance operations and the power demand are uncertain. Our approach is tested on real life instances within a rolling horizon framework.