Distribution of mobile robots and placement of charging stations in solar farms

Duarte Henriques da Luz Cerdeira

Key information

Authors:

Duarte Henriques da Luz Cerdeira (Duarte Henriques da Luz Cerdeira)

Supervisors:

Rui Fernando Faustino Bettencourt (Rui Fernando Faustino Bettencourt); Alberto Manuel Martinho Vale (Alberto Manuel Martinho Vale)

Published in

November 27, 2024

Abstract

The maintenance and cleaning of solar parks make up a significant portion of the operational costs. Recently, the use of robots to perform these tasks has gained popularity, requiring efficient routing for their effective deployment. To further complement their missions, charging points can be strategically placed throughout the site, enabling the robots to recharge mid-operation. This thesis addresses this challenge by modelling the problem as a multiple traveling salesmen problem (MTSP) and developing a mixed integer linear programming formulation. Four different solution methods were implemented: A brute force method, a random method, a genetic algorithm based method, and an exact approach. Additionally, a search strategy was developed that adds charging stops to existing tours, extending existing MTSP algorithms for problems with battery or fuel constraints. The algorithms were tested on both artificial and real-world scenarios. While the random and BF solvers could only be applied for very small problems, the exact approach performed efficiently on all small instances, and the GA based approach showed the most potential, being able to solve large-scale cases and providing effective solutions in the real-world scenarios.