Maintenance Optimizations

Using maintenance can be beneficial for several reasons, such as:

• Suggestion for when the most economical time would be to conduct maintenance work.
• Possibility to compare different maintenance scenarios to see how prolonged maintenance would affect the production plan.
• Yearly revision planning.

INPUT PARAMETERS

The parameters that can be entered are how often the maintenance should occur and how long each maintenance period should be.

It is also possible to enter if the unit should run on partial load or come to a complete stop during this maintenance period.

Time since last maintenance has occurred can also be entered as input data for the optimization.

Find the optimal and most economic period to do maintenance on units

Scenarios

It is possible to set up different scenarios with different settings of maintenance. By doing this one can, for example, see how prolonged maintenance would affect the production plan and make comparisons between the different scenarios.

With these scenarios it is also possible to see what the total cost for the maintenance would be if compared to the normal case where no maintenance is needed.

Results

In the picture above is an example of a 7 day production plan. In the top pane you see different production units stacked to fulfill the district heating load which is presented by the cyan line. The bottom pane represents how the content of the accumulator changes during the week.

In the picture above, you can see the results of the maintenance optimization. The first shutdown occurs after 69 hours and the second of another 19 hours. We see that the optimizer fills this void partially with starting a peak load boiler but also by changing the usage of the thermal storage.

Above, you can see the results from a longer time perspective, the rules were here that the shutdown had to be done every 25th day and the stop time was set for 2 days during an optimization length of 2 months.