During the seminar, we will present our work on metaheuristic algorithms for
the
transmission maintenance scheduling problem, which was a competition problem in
the ROADEF 2020 challenge.

Woller, D., Rada, J. & Kulich, M. The ALNS metaheuristic for the transmission
maintenance scheduling. J Heuristics 29, 349–382 (2023).
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10732-023-09514-x.

Abstract:
ROADEF Challenge is an established international competition addressing
challenging industrial problems of combinatorial optimization. It is organized
by the French Operations Research and Decision Support Society (ROADEF) every 2
years since 1999. The most recent ROADEF challenge 2020 was co-organized by the
French electricity transmission network operator, the RTE company. The
competition problem addressed a novel variant of the transmission maintenance
scheduling problem, distinctive in that it has multiple time-dependent
properties, constraints, and a risk-based aggregate objective function.
Therefore, the problem is more complex than the previous formulations, and the
existing methods are not directly applicable. This paper presents a
metaheuristic algorithm based on the adaptive large neighborhood search. The
algorithm’s performance is based on a large bank of newly proposed
problem-specific destroy and repair heuristics, an efficient local search
engine, and a penalization mechanism for avoiding invalid solutions. The
algorithm is compared with the best-known solutions from all competition phases
and other methods submitted to the final phase. The result shows that the
method
yields consistent performance in all available datasets. The proposed algorithm
finished 6th in the semifinal phase of the competition and 8–9th in the final
phase. Finally, the effect of individual components and the algorithm’s
behaviour are analyzed in detail.

Link to paper:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10732-023-09514-x

The seminar will be of a short length (20 minutes + 10 minutes discussion).