Resilience assessment and improvement of distribution networks against extreme weather events

摘要

The storm, as one of the most frequent natural disasters, has a significant impact on the critical electrical power infrastructure. Therefore, providing a framework to enhance the strength of components of the power system, such as conductors and poles, is a practical means to reduce damage caused by extreme weather events. In response to this critical requirement, this paper presents a framework that includes three stages, i.e. natural occurrence modeling, component vulnerability and network resilience assessment, and network resilience improvement. In order to evaluate the resilience of the network components, fragility models of conductors and poles and Monte Carlo simulation are used. Furthermore, to improve the resilience of the network, vegetation management and upgrading and repairing of network poles are employed as the network hardening strategies. Then, to determine the components of the network that need reinforcement, the hardening problem is formulated as an optimization problem and solved by the genetic algorithm where budget constraints, the criticality of loads, and the accessibility of network components are considered. Finally, the proposed method is applied to a real network to demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.