Identifying Sets of Critical Components That Affect the Resilience of Power Networks

The resilience of a power network characterizes its ability to maintain electricity supply to its customers in the face of unexpected events, like man-made attacks and natural disasters. In this brief, we identify critical components that jeopardize the resilience of a power network. The total amount of interrupted electric energy caused by damaged components is adopted to quantify the power network’s resilience and can be obtained by integrating the outage power with time during the entire resilience process. The identification of critical components is formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem, and the NSGA-II algorithm is used to derive the Pareto-optimal solutions. Simulation results on the IEEE 39 Bus and IEEE 118 Bus show that the proposed method can effectively identify the set of critical components for maintaining the power network resilience. It is also revealed that criticality regarding the resilience and criticality regarding the integrity of a power network are loosely correlated. This confirms the need for focusing on the right set of equipment in boosting the resilience of power networks.