Distribution systems are often crippled by catastrophic damage caused by a natural disaster. Well-designed hardening can significantly improve the performance of post-disaster restoration operations. Such performance is quantified by a resilience measure associated with the operability trajectory. The distribution system hardening problem can be formulated as a two-stage stochastic problem, where the inner operational problem addresses the proper sequencing of post-disaster repairs and the outer problem the judicious selection of components to harden. We propose a deterministic robust reformulation with two solution methods, an MILP formulation and a heuristic approach. We provide computational evidence on various IEEE test feeders which illustrates that the heuristic approach provides near-optimal hardening solutions efficiently.
@article{arxiv.1711.02205,
title = {Distribution Systems Hardening against Natural Disasters},
author = {Yushi Tan and Arindam K. Das and Payman Arabshahi and Daniel S. Kirschen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.02205},
year = {2017}
}