Section: Contracts and Grants with Industry

Contract with EDF on maintenance planning

We are currently working on a project aiming to plan the energy production and the maintenance breaks for a set of nuclear power plants generating electricity. This problem has two different levels of decisions. The first one consist in determining, for a certain time horizon, when the different power plants will have to stop in order to perform a refueling and to decide the amount of this refueling. Given a set of scenarios defining variable levels of energy consumption, the second decision level aims to decide the quantity of power each plant will have to produce. The model that we are proposing combines issues of stochastic optimization (to handle demand scenarios), robust optimization (to account for variation in maintenance duration), and dynamic optimization (the maintenance of nuclear plants are programmed on a five year horizon, but the long term planning is review each month for adjustments due to perturbations.

This project is carried in collaboration between EDF R&D (OSIRIS lab) INRIA team Dolphin and Realopt. The research is the subject of the PhD thesis of Nicolas Dupin (DGA).