A Framework for Expansion Planning of Data Centers in Electricity and Data Networks Under Uncertainty

This paper presents the expansion planning for data centers and data routes in the data and electricity networks considering the uncertainties in the planning horizon to ensure an acceptable rate of service to the requests received from the end-users in the data network. The objective is to determine the location and capacity of the data centers as well as the required data routes while considering the imposed constraints in the electricity and data networks. The installation cost of data centers and data routes, as well as the expected operation cost of the data centers, are minimized. The proposed problem addressed the uncertainties in the expansion planning of the electricity networks including the availability of renewable generation resources, the variations in electricity demand, the availability of generation and transmission components in the electricity network, and the uncertainties in the number of requests received by the user groups in the data network. The problem is formulated as a mixed integer linear programming problem and Bender decomposition and electricity price signals are used to capture the interaction among the data and electricity networks. The presented case study shows the effectiveness of the proposed approach.