Intelligent crew and outage scheduling in electrical distribution system by hybrid generic algorithm

Working outages such as component maintenance/exchange and system extension are important routine works in distribution systems. The scheduling for crew dispatching and customer outages is inherently a discrete, nonlinear, and multiple objective problem. In this paper, a hybrid evolutionary algorithm is exploited to solve the outage scheduling and crew dispatching for distribution system maintenance. Fitness function with practical considerations is proposed. Optimal solution of the date and timing to start the work and the candidate teams to send for the work are solved. The scheduling is capable of the planning for the cases of multiple teams with different get-into time and get-off time for multiple work areas. A practical distribution system is selected to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.