1. ¹University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
2. ²University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK

Correspondence: M Alardhi, School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering, P.O. Box 88, University of Manchester, Manchester M60 1QD, UK. E-mail: mohsen.alardhi@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk

Received August 2005; Accepted November 2006; Published online 11 April 2007.

Abstract

Maintenance scheduling of cogeneration plants, which produce both electric power and desalinated water, is a typical complex process with long-term operations and planning problems. The plants' maintenance scheduling process has to determine the appropriate schedule for preventive maintenance, while satisfying all the system constraints and maintaining adequate system availability. It is an optimization problem and the maintenance and system constraints include the crew constraint, maintenance window constraint and time limitation constraint. In this paper, an integer linear-programming model, which has been developed, is described which schedules the preventive maintenance tasks in a multi-cogeneration plant. Results of a test example of such a plant situated in Kuwait are presented to show the applicability of the approach.