Electric Power Distribution Maintenance Crews Routing for Fault Location: Time to Bite the Road-Network Disruptions Bullet

Abstract

The power distribution system is the most critical, among the power systems, in delivering electricity. Consequently, faults that occur in most cases due to the weather, can cause diverse socio-economic impacts. Hence, considering fault location, the lion's share of the literature addresses maintenance crews patrol routing by merely regarding the power distribution system faults, despite possibly blocked roads or devices accessibility be affected by the weather as well. To properly optimize power distribution system crews inspection routing, the blocked roads must be avoided and the optimization must be conducted to reachable devices. This process is initiated by ltering the blocked roads from the road-network, then a genetic algorithm based on permutation operators is employed on the suitably coded solutions. Furthermore, it was proposed a test case, for the optimization procedure, with a road-network, where the blocked roads were gradually included, and a power distribution system. The resulting solutions showed optimized inspection routes that deviate from blocked roads and skipped from unreachable devices, which is a possible consequence of road-network disruptions. In this manner, they may impact on power distribution maintenance crews routing. Therefore, the suggested methodology proved suitable for a maintenance crew routing under road-network blockage.