Developing algorithms to allocate power thresholds

Blackouts or power outages can have many different effects like interrupting various important economic activities, threatening health and safety of public like loss of power in hospitals, and causing significant inconvenience to individuals and businesses. Mitigating blackouts is an important challenge for power grid operators. In this paper, we propose an alternative solution to blackouts called as brownout where a limit is imposed on the power consumption of the consumers. Different algorithms have been developed to ensure fair allocation of available power from utility to consumers. A hybrid algorithm is also developed that leads to minimal violation, which represents minimum user inconvenience. The developed approaches are tested on a real world dataset of two regions and violations obtained are as low as 17 to 20 percentage, which is an impressive reduction.