Optimal crew site visit to improve the reliability of electricity distribution networks

Abstract

This paper addresses the crew site visit scheduling problem whose purpose is to reduce the unplanned power outage causing by digging activities nearby underground cables. It is known that a supervisory crew visiting a digging event can significantly curtail the failure probability. However, due to limited workforce, a power distribution company cannot assign crew to visit all registered digging events. In this paper, a predictive model is deployed to obtain the failure probability for each event. A mathematical formulation and a branch-and-cut algorithm are introduced so as to give an optimal solution based on the predicted failure probability. A case study on a real-world electricity distribution network in the Netherlands is presented to show the efficiency of the proposed approach.