A novel ant colony inspection scheme for satellite integrated smart grid

Abstract The extensive deployment of smart grids has heightened the demands for communication reliability. By leveraging rapidly advancing satellite communication technologies, these systems can enhance the smart grid’s coverage and robustness in network performance. The integration of drones with smart grids for transmission line inspections facilitates early detection and mitigation of faults and potential risks, thereby enhancing network resilience while reducing problem-solving costs. To address the inefficiencies, complexities, and high expenses associated with traditional manual inspections, a pre-clustering traveling salesman problem model is developed alongside an unmanned aerial vehicle inspection strategy based on an enhanced ant colony algorithm. This approach enables simultaneous safety inspections across critical areas, essential components, and transmission lines. The simulation experiment results indicate that the designed method greatly improves both convergence speed and effectiveness under multiple task requirements, particularly in large-scale scenarios.