Application of VRP Techniques to the Allocation of Resources in an Electric Power Distribution System

摘要

Vehicle Routing Problem VRP was applied to resource allocation in a power distribution system with needs for service restoration. The objective function consisted in minimizing the displacement by the fleet of maintenance crew. Some critical constraints were also considered: guaranteeing visits of maintenance crew to all requests from locations with service disruption, priority criteria with three levels of severity to classified failures and MTZ constraint to avoid subtours. The implementation was tested in Augerat instances as well as in others proposed by the authors. An exact technique run with Gusek software using gomory cutting was the first attempt to solve the problem, but results were not satisfactory leaving unvisited nodes, and in some cases the computer ran out of memory. A second approach obtained an initial solution by k-opt heuristic, then separated improvements are performed with two different metaheuristics: simulated annealing SAA and genetic algorithm GA. Results indicate that SAA provides more significant improvements. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.