EEM348 Principles of Intelligent Systems

Academic Year 2019/20 (Semester II)

Test 2 (22 May 2020, Friday; 8.30am – 9.30am)

1. Briefly explain what is Genetic Algorithm (GA).

(10 marks)
2. Describe all steps involved in executing GA.
(20 marks)
3. Design a maintenance schedule to do maintenance for three power units using GA. Use the case
given below as your reference to design the schedule.

The maintenance task be carried out to the three power units has several constraints and
uncertainties, such as failure and forced outages of power equipment and delays in obtaining spare
parts, which sometimes resulting in a short notice revision in the schedule. Usually, the
maintenance scheduling is done manually and there is no guarantee that the optimum or even
near-optimum schedule is produced.

Generally, power system components are made to operate continuously throughout their life by
means of preventive maintenance. The purpose of maintenance scheduling is to find the sequence
of outages of power units over a given period of time (normally a year) such that the security of
power system is maximized.

Any outage in a power system is associated with some loss in security. The security margin is
determined by the system’s net reserve. The net reserve, in turn, is defined as the total installed
generating capacity of the system minus the power lost due to a scheduled outage and minus the
maximum load forecast during the maintenance period. Here, the net reserve, total installed
generating capacity, power lost, and maximum load are defined as 𝑁, 𝑇𝑐 , 𝑃𝑙 , and 𝑀𝑙 , respectively.
For instance, if we assume that the total installed capacity is 100MW and a unit of 50MW is
scheduled for maintenance during the period when the maximum load is predicted to be 30MW,
then the net reserve will be 20MW.

Maintenance scheduling must ensure that sufficient net reserve is provided for secure power
supply during any maintenance period. Suppose there are three power units to be maintained in
three equal intervals. The maximum loads, 𝑀𝑙 expected during these intervals are 30MW, 50MW,
and 60MW. The unit capacities and their maintenance requirements are presented in Table 1. The
constraints for this problem can be specified as follows:

• Maintenance of any unit starts at the beginning of an interval and finishes at the end of the
same or adjacent interval. The maintenance cannot be aborted or finished earlier than
scheduled.

• The net reserve of the power system must be greater than or equal to zero at any interval.

The optimum criterion here is that the net reserve must be at the maximum during any
maintenance period.

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 Table 1. Power units and their maintenance requirements

Unit Number of intervals required for unit

Unit Capacity, MW
Number maintenance for one year

1 40 2

2 10 1

3 50 1

a. Determine the fitness function for this problem. Explain your answer.
(20 marks)
b. How many bit strings that will form a gene in this problem?
(10 marks)
c. Based on (b) above, write all possible genes for each unit.
(10 marks)
d. If we are interested to start our GA with 𝑁 = 4, where 𝑁 is the chromosome
population, only 4 chromosomes will be selected randomly from the chromosomes
pool. Assuming that Unit Number 1 is given priority to be selected to start the
maintenance, list out all possible chromosomes for this case. Then, determine the top
2 net reserve chromosomes.
(20 marks)
e. What are genetic operators and how they are used in your design?
(10 marks)

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