Evolutionary Human-UAV Cooperation for Transmission Network Restoration

Power transmission networks are vulnerable to natural or man-made disasters, and it is of critical importance to efficiently restore damaged power supply in disaster-affected areas. A large-scale damaged transmission network can contain many faults that are initially uninspected/unlocated. Using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to inspect these faults can significantly improve the efficiency of subsequent restoration performed by human operators. Such a cooperative human-UAV scheduling problem is highly complex due to the correlation between UAV schedules and human-team schedules. In this article, we propose a cooperative evolutionary algorithm that simultaneously evolves two populations, one of UAV scheduling solutions (U-solutions) and the other of human-team scheduling solutions (H-solutions), which cooperate by determining a best matching U-solution for each H-solution and evaluating U-solutions based on a surrogate objective function that is iteratively improved by feedback from H-solutions. Our algorithm exhibits significant performance advantages over the state-of-the-arts on various test instances and an application to transmission network restoration in the 2017 Jiuzhaigou earthquake.