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Crew Management for Power Restoration during Storms

Crew Management for Power Restoration during Storms

Crew Management for Power Restoration during Storms

(OP)
Hi,
Can anyone provide or suggest me with some useful resources e.g journal papers that focus on research related to stochastic optimization of crew scheduling for power restoration during storms such as Sandy. The objective function should include optimized crew allocation and dispatch to reduce the customer power outage time and restore power with lowest cost possible. I used google scholar to find research papers but haven't come with some related ones.
Please help.
Thanks
- Sapyns

RE: Crew Management for Power Restoration during Storms

If you approach this as an academic exercise, I don't think you'll find any work that has been done to optimize that effort. Anyone can minimize or maximize an objective function.

While you focus on minimizing the restoration time and cost, there's a lot of behind the scenes activities that need to be considered like:
- getting mutual aid from other utilities. This is beyond your control since they may be dealing with elements of the same storm. What they can send in terms of manpower and equipment is highly variable.
- travel time for other utilities to get to the area. Once you get a sense of what manpower is available, consider the fact that many of them may be days away before they can be of help.
- logistics, once you've gotten help from other utilities, you have a work force several times larger than your normal one. They must have a place to stay, must be fed and their vehicles will need fuel. All that must be taken care of before you get some work out of them.
- communications is sometimes an issue since you may have no cell service and many companies have radios with different frequencies.
- there's a need to impart some local knowledge from a safety standpoint to make sure the crews are familiar with the types of equipment and possible problems in the area that they might have to deal with.

The problem is much like an army commander faces in trying to win a major battle. You need manpower in strategic places, the proper balance of equipment and supporting logistics to sustain the effort. While the objective may be to win at minimum cost, you need to flesh out the entire process to see which steps are the most critical to success.

RE: Crew Management for Power Restoration during Storms

EPRI publications might have relivant information and such modeling

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