Genset scheduling in a redundant electric power system for an offshore vessel using mixed integer linear programming

This paper proposes several schemes for optimal scheduling of power producers in a shipboard power system for a typical offshore supply vessel, having a multiple number of possibly varying capacity gensets. The proposed scheduling methods are illustrated using four alternative power system configurations, ranging from a few large gensets to many gensets of smaller ratings. Mixed integer linear programming is used to formulate the optimization problems. Three formulations are presented; one for minimizing online capacity without further objectives, one that includes a redundancy constraint for loosing a group of gensets (to account for a worst case failure scenario), and one to also balance running hours and minimizing connect/disconnect of the gensets. These different objectives can be combined and weighted based on importance, with or without redundancy constraints. Simulations are carried out to demonstrate the properties of the three different scheduling methods. The first method, minimizing online capacity only, is also used to illustrate the differences between the four genset configurations. This shows, for instance, that using more small gensets ensures generally a lower online available power (the connected capacity matches better the prevailing load), and near optimal loading of each genset around 80% (assuming equal loadsharing), at the same time as resilience to genset failures is preserved.