Enhancing Seismic Resilience of Electric Power Distribution Systems with Mobile Power Sources

Mobile power sources (MPSs), including mobile emergency generators (MEGs), truck-mounted mobile energy storage systems (MESSs) and electric vehicles (EVs) have great potentials to be employed as grid-support resources during power grid emergency operating conditions to supply the critical loads and enhance the resilience of distribution system (DS) via a swift disaster restoration. We here investigate the MPS dispatch (i.e., routing and scheduling) in coordination with DS dynamic network reconfiguration. We propose a two-stage restoration scheme to facilitate the DS restoration following the high-impact low-probability (HILP) seismic disasters. In the first stage, a seismic hazard is simulated through a Monte-Carlo simulation (MCS) engine to estimate the unavailability of power distribution branches under a suite of seismic force scenarios. In the second stage, a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) optimization model is formulated for DS restoration that co-optimizes the routing and scheduling of MPSs and DS dynamic network reconfiguration. The MINLP model is then linearized to a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model to reduce the computation complexity, where the seismic-resilience recovery strategies are generated at different timescales. The efficacy of the proposed method is evaluated on the IEEE 33-node test system and the results verify a significant reduction in the load outages and an improved power system resilience to HILP earthquakes.