Review of unit maintenance scheduling in market environment

Unit maintenance scheduling (UMS) is important to reduce the unit failure rate and guarantee the system reliability. The deregulation of power industry creates the independent market entities with different objectives, including the self-interested power producers for maximizing their potential payoffs and the independent system operator (ISO) for ensuring the system reliability. Therefore, UMS should also be determined to achieve a balance between the producers' benefits and the system reliability, which is different from the traditional system-centralized mechanism. Based on the current research, this paper mainly discusses the impacts of market environment on the UMS from several aspects, which contain the schedule mode, the related uncertainty factors, the assessment criterion, the producers' UMS model and the ISO's coordination strategy, and the model's solving algorithm. Furthermore, some challenges that may be faced in the future study are also presented.