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A Resilience-Oriented Approach for Power Network Design and Operation
Abstract
This dissertation presents a holistic resilience-oriented approach to design and operate power systems with higher tolerance of disturbances. Inspired from naturally resilient ecosystems, this approach is able to boost power system resilience while being intentionally agnostic against the cause or the source of the threat. The proposed approach can minimize the cyber and physical hazards’ adversarial impact to power systems for its secure and reliable supply of electric energy.
This work first relates the power systems and ecosystems as system types and network graph models down to the components and flows based on their commonalities and functionalities. The model relationship allows us to translate the ecosystems’ resilient traits, such as ecological robustness (RECO), to power systems. An optimization model is thus built to optimizes RECO for power systems with the constraints of power flow equations and operational limits. It takes the network structure, generator setpoints, and voltage setpoints as decision variables and optimizes both the power network structure and operation status for the optimal RECO.
Power systems are threatened by adversaries from both cyber and physical domains. A graph-based approach is proposed to leverage power network structure and power flow property to identify critical sets of multiple hazards. Such N-x contingencies can be realized by cyber and/or physical attacks and bring disastrous outcomes to power systems functionalities. By implementing the proposed RECO oriented optimization on different power system cases, the enhancement of reliability and resilience under the examination of planned and unexpected N-x contingencies is outstanding. The results show the effectiveness of using RECO for guiding power network design and operation even the power network structure is not redundant as ecosystems. To broaden the understanding, there are analyses of the inherent characteristics of RECO-optimized cases for their network structure and power flow distribution. It shows that RECO in power systems favors the homogeneity of power flow distribution over the network. Such feature improves power systems’ inherent ability of absorbing disturbances and thus boost power system resilience against all kinds of cyber and physical hazards. This new knowledge unveils the nature of robustness and resilience or power systems and it can be applied to other resilient networks’ design and operation.
Citation
Huang, Hao (2022). A Resilience-Oriented Approach for Power Network Design and Operation. Doctoral dissertation, Texas A&M University. Available electronically from https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /198525.