Abstract
Power distribution systems in the US are commonly supported by wood utility poles. These assets require regular maintenance to enhance the reliability of power delivery to support many dependent functions of the society. Limitations in budget, however, warrant efficient allocation of limited resources based on optimal preventive maintenance plans. A few studies have developed risk-based metrics to support risk-informed decision making in preventive maintenance planning for power distribution systems. However, integration of risk-based metrics and optimization for enhancing the life-cycle resilience of distribution systems has not been explored. To address this gap, this paper proposes a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model to maximize the life-cycle resilience of aging power distribution systems subject to multi-occurrences of hurricane events using an optimal risk-based maintenance planning. For this purpose, a risk-based index called the Expected Outages is proposed and integrated into the optimization problem to minimize the total expected number of power outages in the entire planning horizon. Various uncertainties in the performance of poles under stochastic occurrences of hazards are taken into account through advanced fragility models and an efficient recursive formulation that models the uncertainty of precedent pole failures. The proposed approach is applied to a large, realistic power distribution system for long-term maintenance planning given a total budget limit and different levels of periodic budget constraints. The resulting optimization problems are solved through the branch and bound algorithm. Results indicate that applying the presented methodology leads to a significant enhancement of the life-cycle resilience of distribution systems compared to the commonly implemented strength-based maintenance strategy set by National Electric Safety Code.
Highlights
Electric power supports numerous activities in the modern society
This study proposes a mixedinteger nonlinear programming (MINLP) model to enhance the resilience of distribution systems exposed to hurricanes through an optimal preventive maintenance planning
NUMERICAL RESULTS The objective of this paper is to present an optimal preventive maintenance planning framework to efficiently enhance the long-term resilience of power distribution systems
Summary
Electric power supports numerous activities in the modern society. Over 80% of power outages in the US between 2003 and 2012 have been caused by weather-related hazards such as hurricane events [1], [2]. The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Kai Li. outages were caused due to failure of wood poles. Because of the availability and cost-effectiveness of wood poles, they are extensively used for supporting distribution systems. Wood poles suffer from a significant rate of decay especially in coastal regions with high levels of humidity. Storm-related outages in the US have incurred extensive economic losses that are estimated to be as high as $55 billion every year [3]. Hurricane Irene in 2011 and Hurricane Sandy in 2012 left 6.69 and
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