Robust Optimal Hardening for Resilience Enhancement of Power System

Extreme events like natural disasters and malicious attacks, make severe threats for power system. To improve power system resilience against these high-impact low-probability events, network hardening is introduced as a constructive strategy. This paper presents a robust optimization model to attain the most effective hardening plan as defending resource to deal with multiple contingencies. The resulted tri-level mathematical formulation is solved by column and constraint generation (C&CG) algorithm. In which, on the first level the hardening decisions are made, the second level is to determine the maximum damage caused by the extreme event, and on the third level the system operator tries to minimize the load-loss through an optimal operation of the power system. Extensive numerical studies on the 39-bus test system demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.