Joint Optimization of Maintenance Scheduling and Performance of Networked Systems

Critical urban infrastructures such as energy grid and transport network have the following characteristics: 1) These network-based systems have to fulfil continuous and stable transmission demand. The network-based systems are complex with many nodes and arcs. 2) Either system break or maintenance will lead to regional supply shutdown or shortage. In this paper, we consider a network-based system with single-origin and single-destination. The degradation of the arc is caused material aging and degeneration. When some components are failed, the load that they took has to be shared by the other components to hold the contracted demand. The early/potential failures are hidden until some consequences are evident to be detected/monitored. On one hand, the maintenance activities take some regional shutdown. On the other hand, the system performance should be maintained at a given threshold. Due to the arcs locate in different region of the whole networked system, and then the maintenance sequence is important when the maintenance time duration is considered. Eventually the sequence of components waiting for maintenance should be optimized with the aim of restoring the system performance within given time, which means the demand of each OD pair can be met in given time. In this paper the network average traffic objective is established to optimize and arrange maintenance sequence based on two rules: 1) capacity rule and 2) maximum network flow change (MNFC) to assign priority to critical infrastructure. Then the different sequences will be compared with the contribution to the network performance. Eventually this paper will model real infrastructure network and simulate maintenance procedure to verify the feasibility of maintenance scheme.