AUTHOR=Liu Yuxin , Wang Jiaxin , Zhao Jingjie , Li Xianghua 

TITLE=Route Stability in the Uncertain Capacitated Arc Routing Problem

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Energy Research

VOLUME=Volume 10 - 2022

YEAR=2022

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/energy-research/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2022.933705

DOI=10.3389/fenrg.2022.933705

ISSN=2296-598X

ABSTRACT=Power line inspections in microgrid can be modelled as the uncertain capacitated arc routing problem, which is a classic combinatorial optimization problem. As an evolutionary computation method, genetic programming is used as a hyper-heuristic method to automatically evolve routing policies that can make real-time decisions in an uncertain environment. Most existing researches on genetic programming hyper-heuristic for the uncertain capacitated arc routing problem only focus on optimizing the total cost of solutions. As a result, the actual routes directed by the routing policies evolved by genetic programming hyper-heuristic are usually not stable, that is the routes have a large fluctuations in different uncertain environments. However, for marketing or considering from the drivers' and customers' perspective, the routes should not be changed too often or too much. Addressing on this problem, this paper first proposes a method to estimate the similarity between two routes, and then extends it for evaluating the stability of routes in the uncertain environments. A novel genetic programming hyper-heuristic, which considers two objectives, i.e., the solution quality (total cost) and the stability of routes, is designed. The experimental studies demonstrate that the proposed genetic programming hyper-heuristic with stability in consideration can obtain more stable solutions than the traditional algorithm without deteriorating the total cost. The approach provided in this study can be easily extended for solving other combinatorial optimization problems in the microgrid.