Power system resilience assessment considering critical infrastructure resilience approaches and government policymaker criteria

Abstract

The electric power system is one of the most important critical infrastructures of a country. Recently, the number of natural and man-made disasters is increased, which can impose extensive damages and costs to the power system. A resilient power system can withstand against, adapt to and recover from these disasters. Power system resilience is quantified by mathematical tools which are called “resilience metrics”. Currently, a lot of resilience metrics are proposed in the power system literature. In this paper, based on the extensive research in the critical infrastructure resilience literature which specifically concentrates on the “area-based” resilience metrics, a new area-based resilience metric is proposed which can measure the power system resilience considering the government policymaker criteria, which are rarely noticed before. The proposed and conventional area-based resilience metrics are evaluated based on the real data from the 2012 Superstorm Sandy in the USA, which led to significant damage to the power distribution system. The simulation results show that the proposed area-based resilience metric is very simple, can successfully address actual power system performance curves and is more meaningful and tangible than the conventional area-based metrics for the government policymaker. The proposed area-based resilience metric has also a general form and can be used for other critical infrastructures.