Multitasked maintenance crews to serve emergency scenarios in electric distribution utilities

This paper proposes a mathematical model to handle emergency service requests in electric power distribution utilities. Given available maintenance crews and their already assigned service orders, a mathematical model based on mixed integer linear programming is developed to solve the dynamic vehicle routing problem related to the task of deciding which maintenance crew will complete each pending emergency service request. One key aspect refers to the real-time constraint, what means that computational system must be able to handle a solution to the emergency work order dispatch problem with response times in the order of milliseconds or even microseconds. First, the problem definition is presented, followed by preliminary results that have shown how suitable can be the proposed definition when addressing the referred problem and also by using Google Earth plataform. Finally, conclusions point out the main contributions of this work.