Improving interdependent urban power and gas distribution systems resilience through optimal scheduling of mobile emergency supply and repair resources

Abstract

Urban electric power and natural gas systems, serving as the most critical facilities that provide fundamental support to people's daily life, have been increasingly interdependent in their operation over the past decades. This growing interdependency presents great challenges and demands for enhancing the resilience of the interdependent systems, particularly driven by the recent cold weather events. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive strategy for scheduling various types of emergency resources, including mobile and stationary generators, repair crews, and fuel tankers, with the goal of enhancing the resilience of interdependent power and gas distribution systems in the aftermath of disasters. In particular, the strategy incorporates the routing of mobile resources to orchestrate their dynamic moving behaviors. Fuel supply issue for mobile and stationary distributed generators is also addressed through modeling the fuel exchange processes among generators, fuel tankers, and locations. Furthermore, we present a model of repair process to fully capture the real-world repair activities, allowing varying numbers of repair crews to work in a cooperative way. The proposed strategy is formulated into a tractable mixed-integer second-order cone problem. Finally, case studies are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the strategy in enhancing the resilience of the interdependent power and gas distribution systems.