Section: Bilateral Contracts and Grants with Industry

Contract with EDF on robust maintenance planning

Our project with EDF concerns the optimization of the long term energy production planning, allowing for nuclear power plants maintenance. The challenges are to handle the large-scale instance of a five year planning and to handle the stochastic aspects of the problem: the stochastic variation of the electricity demand, the production capacity and the duration of maintenance period. The key decisions to be optimized are the dates of outages (for maintenance) and the level refuelling that determines the production of the year to come. 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 approaches shall be evaluated on real life instances within a rolling horizon framework.