For example, the electricity companies deal with many complex demand and maintenance scheduling issues in their power generation facilities (such as thermal or nuclear power plants). As a typical instance, certain types of nuclear power plants must be regularly shutdown for refueling and maintenance. In such cases, maintenance scheduling is a more critical issue than demand satisfaction, especially when there is uncertainty in demand. The decisions on the energy production rate, refuels and outage scheduling are subject to various types of constraints. A -good- solution satisfies imposed non-linear production profiles, complex fuel variation equations, bounds on refueling, bounds on stocks, minimum/maximum spacing between maintenance outages, and maintenance resource constraints (material, teams). An additional characteristic of energy production and maintenance scheduling, which makes the problem even more difficult, is that the planning horizon can be long, for example several years, yielding a large-scale optimisation problem.

All relevant contributions are welcome. We are particularly interested in the ROADEF/EURO Challenge 2010 submissions.