Multi-Tour Set Traveling Salesman Problem in Planning Power Transmission Line Inspection

TL;DR

This paper introduces a generalized multi-tour traveling salesman problem for power line inspection, proposing ILP and metaheuristic solutions to optimize multi-vehicle inspection routes within a limited budget, demonstrated on real-world data.

Contribution

It formulates a novel multi-route TSP variant for power line inspection and develops scalable algorithms, including a metaheuristic, for practical large-scale applications.

Findings

Metaheuristic provides competitive solutions with lower computational demand.

The ILP formulation yields optimal solutions but is computationally intensive.

Demonstrated effectiveness on real-world power line inspection scenario.

Abstract

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.