Planning of Resilient Electric Power Distribution Systems

Abstract

The distribution systems expansion planning is an important topic for the distribution companies that seek to guarantee the physical, operational, and safety performance of the system and in order to preserve the quality of the services and product to the users. Electric power blackouts due to natural disasters are concerns of network operators. Thus, researches are being developed to determine the impacts that natural disasters have under the distribution system to develop planning models in order to increase network resilience. At the same time, new technologies based on smart grids, network monitoring, and microgrids that allow the automatic operation of the system in restorative operation scenarios, are being developed. In that way, this research project considers the integrated solution of these two types of problems, that is, the normal operation and operation under contingencies. The first type of problem consists in determining an investment plan for the distribution system to meet the increasing demand on normal operating conditions, considering the installation and reinforcement of the network equipment such as substations, circuits, and distributed generation, dispatchable and/or renewable. The second problem consists of determining the restorative state operation schemes after the occurrence of a natural disaster, minimizing the power outage of the final users. For these problems, this research project proposes the development of mathematical optimization models that can be solved directly with commercial optimization solvers and variable neighborhood search meta-heuristics. In order to validate the proposed methodology, tests in carried on systems available in the literature must be performed under different conditions and operating scenarios.