Scheduling maneuvers for the restoration of electric power distribution networks: Formulation and heuristics

When a fault occurs in a power distribution network, energy utilities have limited time to define and run a restoration plan. While this problem is widely studied in the literature, existing works consider neither the work in parallel of multiple maintenance teams, nor the time taken by the teams to move between locations. In this paper, we address the problem of assigning and sequencing maneuver operations of a restoration plan. We propose modeling this situation as a scheduling problem, and then present specific heuristics for its solution. Computational experiments show that ignoring multiple teams and time requirements leads to solutions that seem to be efficient, but are in fact not. The proposed heuristics are able to quickly return good solutions, even for large instances, allowing their use within the constrained time frames required for the resolution of power outages.