Optimal Coordination of Human Resources and Tasks in Substation Operation and Maintenance

With the rapid growth of social electricity demand, in order to prevent accidental failure of the equipment in the substation, the human resources and operation costs of substation operation and maintenance continue to increase, so the optimization of substation operation and maintenance has attracted great attention. This paper focuses on the optimal coordination of the human resources and the operation and maintenance tasks in the substation. The optimal coordination problem is formulated as a mixed integer linear programming problem. The objective is to minimize the total traffic distance of staff during the execution of tasks which is a direct factor reflecting the cost of operation and maintenance in practice. In the optimization model developed in this paper, we formulate the task execution time in a continuous way, which can avoid the trade-off between calculation accuracy and efficiency, even the infeasibility, caused by time discretization. Furthermore, each task of the substation operation and maintenance is defined as an event for the problem. In this way, the objective function is independent of time and the problem can be efficiently solved based on the triggering of the events. The performance and effectiveness of the developed method is demonstrated using a practical case study.