Crew Dispatch for Commercial and Technical Services in an Electric Power Distribution Company Using ACO Technique

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to describe the application of ACO optimization method for dispatch of road crews for commercial and supply restoration services in an electric power distribution company. The proposed methodology takes as input a large amount of different service orders (commercial and supply restoration), ranked by importance. Thus, it is able to create routes to be taken by each road crew, to select the sequence in which the requests will be met on the current day and the ones that will be met on another day in order to better achieve the company's targets. The methodology presented in this paper is of great relevance for electricity utilities because it optimizes the use of the potential capacity of the available road crews, increasing its efficiency and reducing costs. A computer program -named as ANTECOM -has been developed to apply this method and the results were compared with the ones from the current methodology used by CEMAR (and from other available on the literature), providing better results. Also, it is more suitable for real time applications.