A Multi-objective Swarm Intelligence Approach for Field Crews Patrol Optimization in Power Distribution Systems Restoration

A fault on a power distribution system may cause electricity interruption for several consumers, so a good restoration plan is required to decrease such interruptions duration and, consequently, assure the quality of service. Among the measures for service restoration, there is the dispatch of inspection and maintenance crews. The routing of these teams can be classified as a case of the multiple traveling salesman problem. Although involved in series of decision problems, the power distribution system maintenance crews routing is addressed, in the most part of the literature, as a single-objective problem, an instance of a multi-objective one, or as a multi-objective aggregating approach, which generates a single solution in an optimization run, in contrast with the set of equally good solutions, known as Pareto set, the result of a multi-objective problem. In this paper, a Pareto based multi-objective discrete particle swarm optimization approach was applied with the aim of reducing the patrol duration and also the total crews displacement. Wherein the concept of epsilon-dominance was used to update the set of non-dominated solutions, resulting in a good spreading and convergence of them. To promote an uniform exploration of the Pareto set, the selection of the local leaders of the archive was based on square root distance metrics. The Dijkstra algorithm was employed to find the shortest path between two consecutive points of the route of each team. As a result, a set of solutions were obtained for the routing of maintenance crews for power distribution system restoration.