Bi-Objective Preventive Maintenance Scheduling Optimization of Photovoltaic System based on Availability

Abstract

To ensure smooth running and continues supply of uninterrupted power from the Photovoltaic (PV) power plant, it becomes imperative to develop maintenance strategies that improves the reliability and availability of the system; thus, the need to balance between cost and reliability/availability of PV system arises in the industry. This work focuses on developing selective preventive maintenance algorithm based on the PV subcomponents' reliability that minimizes the preventive maintenance cost while also maximizing system availability over a finite horizon. A minimum reliability threshold was assumed which served as the determining factor on a component if maintenance is to be performed on the component. An algorithm was developed in MATLAB to perform the selection and cost optimization in which an optimal periodicity yielding 5 preventive maintenance actions was obtained resulting to availability of 99.75% and minimal cost of 1,649 monetary units.