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.

翻译：本文关注以多路线单基地场景的旅行商问题推广形式表述的输电线路最优巡检问题。该问题针对具有有限行程预算的巡检车辆进行建模，因此解决方案可由多次行程组合构成，以完全覆盖给定输电线路。此外，该方案还可确定单次行程中可执行巡检任务的车辆数量。问题的最优解通过所提出的整数线性规划（ILP）公式求解，但该方法计算复杂度极高。为此，采用组合元启发式算法解决计算需求问题。所采用的贪婪随机自适应搜索过程在计算需求显著降低的同时，能提供与ILP方法具有竞争力的解，且随问题规模扩展具有更好的可扩展性。所提出的公式与算法在变电站输电线路分段巡检的实际场景中得到了验证。