Abstract—This article proposes a new approach for managing overhaul and planned outages at hydro power plants. The dependency between tasks or the information flow between activities is formulated in a structural matrix with the objective to minimize the total completion time and the cost. The method is used to examine the planning process of a twelve years overhaul at one of Landsvirkjun’s hydro power units. Using the Dependency Structure Matrix (DSM) to optimize the order of activities shows improvements in the overhaul operational plan. The quality of data, including the breakdown of activities into tasks having a reasonable granularity and the relationships of these tasks being known is the main premises for a successful use of the DSM methodology.

Index Terms—maintenance, overhaul, outage, scheduling, dependency structure matrix

Cite: Magnus Thor Jonsson, "A New Approach for Managing Outages at Hydro Power Plants Using Dependency Structure Matrix," Journal of Industrial and Intelligent Information, Vol. 3, No. 4, pp. 342-346, December 2015. doi: 10.12720/jiii.3.4.342-346