Electricity Readers Routing Based on Clustering and Communities Detection

Electric power distribution companies in Brazil assess the energy consumption of most of their costumers by reading the meters in loco. A human reader has an itinerary with clients that should be read on each working day. The number of meters per route tends to increase over time, as the number of customers is constantly growing. At a certain point, the route must be restructured so that it still runs in a single day. This paper proposes the use of clustering techniques integrated with community detection algorithms and a heuristic routing algorithm to solve the problem of globally restructuring the routes used by the readers of the energy distribution companies. Experimental results showed that the proposed method significantly reduced the number of routes required to perform the meters readings.