Graph-based Simulation Framework for Power Resilience Estimation and Enhancement

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive simulation framework that assesses and improves power distribution system resilience against extreme weather events by combining Monte Carlo simulations, weather scenario generation, and optimization of renewable resources.

Contribution

It presents a novel integrated framework that synthesizes distribution networks, generates extreme weather scenarios, and optimizes renewable resource placement using a genetic algorithm for resilience enhancement.

Findings

Framework efficiently evaluates resilience on large-scale networks.

Renewable integration significantly improves system resilience.

Optimized resource placement balances cost and resilience.

Abstract

The increasing frequency of extreme weather events poses significant risks to power distribution systems, leading to widespread outages and severe economic and social consequences. This paper presents a novel simulation framework for assessing and enhancing the resilience of power distribution networks under such conditions. Resilience is estimated through Monte Carlo simulations, which simulate extreme weather scenarios and evaluate the impact on infrastructure fragility. Due to the proprietary nature of power network topology, a distribution network is synthesized using publicly available data. To generate the weather scenarios, an extreme weather generation method is developed. To enhance resilience, renewable resources such as solar panels and energy storage systems (batteries in this study) are incorporated. A customized Genetic Algorithm is proposed to determine the optimal locations and capacities for solar panels and battery installations, maximizing resilience while balancing cost constraints. Experiment results demonstrate that on a large-scale synthetic distribution network with more than 300,000 nodes and 300,000 edges, the proposed framework can efficiently evaluate the resilience, and enhance the resilience through the installations of distributed energy resources (DERs), providing utilities with valuable insights for community-level power system resilience estimation and enhancement.