Joint optimization of maintenance planning and workforce routing for a geographically distributed networked infrastructure

It is paramount to perform timely and appropriate maintenance actions on networked infrastructures, such as power transmission, transportation, telecommunications, and so forth, in order to ensure their reliability in satisfying the prescribed demand required by the economic development and social well-being of a society. For this purpose, the time of travelling between the components to be maintained needs to be considered, as the components of a real-world infrastructure are usually geographically widely distributed. To address this problem, we propose a holistic bi-objective optimization approach for the joint optimization of maintenance planning and workforce routing for a networked infrastructure, in order to determine a practical maintenance plan that can simultaneously maximize its reliability and minimize the incurred cost. To deal with the complexity of the proposed problem, we develop a Two-level Pareto Simulated Annealing algorithm to approximate the Pareto-optimal solutions of the proposed problem. Finally, two numerical examples are employed to illustrate the ability of the proposed approach in dealing with the maintenance optimization problem of a geographically distributed networked infrastructure.