An algorithm for thermal unit maintenance scheduling through combined use of ga sa and ts

This paper describes a method of solving a large scale long term thermal unit maintenance scheduling problem. In the solution algorithm, the genetic algorithm(GA), the simulated annealing(SA) and the tabu search(TS) are cooperatively used. The solution algorithm keeps the advantages of individual algorithm and shows a reasonable combination of local search and global search. The method takes the maintenance class and several consecutive years scheduling into consideration. Several real scale numerical examples demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.