Digitally Boosted Resilience: Digitalization to Enhance Resilience of Electric Power System

In an energy business that supports social activities, enhancing the resilience of power systems is becoming a critical issue. As electric power companies use great amounts of equipment over long periods of time, they risk the deterioration of their facilities. In addition, they face the risk of cyberattacks, especially those that target network control systems and distributed energy systems. Moreover, they are exposed to the risk of natural disasters that humans cannot effectively control or even predict. It is necessary for electric power companies to understand these various risks and take countermeasures to make their systems more resilient. This article addresses the trend of digitalization toward resilience and then introduces a maturity model to show the path to realizing resilience, along with an operational framework structure. In this model, the maturity levels were defined in the order of awareness, standardization of work, digitalization, automation, and continuous improvement according to resilience activities. A resilience framework has been proposed that employs the latest artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to effectively perform information analysis and create incident response rules. Specifically, these rules have been digitalized for resilience activities that are standardized as organizational activities and accumulated as organizational knowledge. The collection of such rules will form a playbook that can be automatically executed in response to such incidents. AI technologies then use these rules to create efficient and flexible recovery schedules; these schedules are not meant to be completed once they are created but are adaptively and constantly rescheduled in line with ongoing incidents and changes in response statuses. The intention of the maturity model and playbook-centered framework is to provide structured solutions and a scalable architecture for global use. As the next step for developing the resilience framework, explainable and generative AI is envisioned. As an example of a resilience initiative, a vegetation management use case that is spanned on the proposed framework is presented. One may claim that digitally enhanced resilience will be a strategic element of future power system operators.