An optimization drone routing model for inspecting wind farms
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METHODOLOGIES AND APPLICATION
An optimization drone routing model for inspecting wind farms Hyeoncheol Baik1 • Jorge Valenzuela2
Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The use of wind turbines to generate electricity is growing worldwide. They comprise an extended area of hundreds of square miles, making the inspection process difficult and time-consuming. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in using a drone, or also known as unmanned aircraft systems, for inspecting wind turbines. Motivated by leveraging drone technology, this paper provides a routing optimization model to reduce the total operation time for inspecting a wind farm. We assume that one drone and one ground vehicle which carries the drone and extra batteries and charging equipment are available. The optimization model is solved in two steps. The first step clusters the wind turbines and optimizes the drone routing in each cluster by solving the classical traveling salesman problem using an integer linear programming model. The second step optimizes the ground vehicle routing by solving the equality generalized traveling salesman problem using an integer linear programming model. We test our proposed model using three case studies created by using actual wind farm locations. We compare the results with two models. One model assumes no clustering of the wind turbines, and the other model uses a greedy approach for determining the ground vehicle route. The results show that the proposed model is more efficient at different flight speeds and endurances. Also, we confirm that the efficiency increases as the drone flies faster or it has longer flight endurance. Keywords Unmanned aircraft system Drone Wind turbine inspection routing Integer linear programming Traveling salesman problem (TSP) Equality generalized traveling salesman problem (E-GTSP)
1 Introduction According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (2018), on a percentage basis, renewables are the fastest growing energy source. Wind farms are being built in large numbers on land and offshore and usually comprise an extended area of hundreds of square miles. To identify potential problems to their proper operation, wind turbines are inspected on a regular basis. The most common inspection practice is a visual inspection by a technician using rope access. This technique is cost effective and Communicated by V. Loia. & Jorge Valenzuela [email protected] Hyeoncheol Baik [email protected] 1
School of Business, Stockton University, Galloway, NJ 08205, USA
2
Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Auburn University, Auburn, AL 36849, USA
offers flexible access to the structure for performing the maintenance and repair tasks. However, this practice has a very low inspection rate, in the range of 2–5 turbines per day (Deign 2016). Recently, there has been increased interest in using an unmanned aircraft system (UAS), or a drone, for inspecting wind turbines. SkySpecs, a
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