Power restoration in emergency situations

Abstract

This paper addresses a problem of assigning electric power repair crews and depots to various locations (cells) in a damaged area during emergency situations such as natural disasters. The problem takes into account the damage levels and consequent demand for various resources at different cells in the area, along with the capacity restrictions of the depots. Two mixed integer quadratic programming models-one for single resource and another for multiple resources allocation are presented in the paper. The objective is to locate the depots, and assigning the crews and other resources to depots to various cells, at a minimum cost. The problem is solved optimally for various dimensions of the problem (e.g., number of cells in the region, number of depots considered and the number of resources) for a limited instance.