Multi-Tour Set Traveling Salesman Problem in Planning Power Transmission Line Inspection
This work addresses the problem of efficient power line inspection for utility companies, but it is incremental as it applies existing optimization techniques to a specific domain scenario.
The authors tackled the problem of optimizing power transmission line inspection by formulating it as a multi-route traveling salesman problem with a limited travel budget, and they solved it using an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation and a greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP) metaheuristic, with the GRASP method providing competitive solutions while being significantly less computationally demanding and scaling better than ILP.
This letter concerns optimal power transmission line inspection formulated as a proposed generalization of the traveling salesman problem for a multi-route one-depot scenario. The problem is formulated for an inspection vehicle with a limited travel budget. Therefore, the solution can be composed of multiple runs to provide full coverage of the given power lines. Besides, the solution indicates how many vehicles can perform the inspection in a single run. The optimal solution of the problem is solved by the proposed Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation, which is, however, very computationally demanding. Therefore, the computational requirements are addressed by the combinatorial metaheuristic. The employed greedy randomized adaptive search procedure is significantly less demanding while providing competitive solutions and scales better with the problem size than the ILP-based approach. The proposed formulation and algorithms are demonstrated in a real-world scenario to inspect power line segments at the electrical substation.