Decision-Making under Uncertainty on Preventive Actions Boosting Power Grid Resilience

The growing impact of weather-related power outages on economy and society in the last decades underlines the rising need for power system resilience. Power system resilience can be boosted through adoption of probabilistic approaches and preventive actions building on smart grid capabilities. Decisions on the best-performing preventive action, however, are non-trivial and must consider the expected impact of an upcoming event, weather forecasts, fault probabilities and their corresponding uncertainties. This paper presents a three-stage decision-making methodology that is based on assessing weighted pre-event and post-event performance loss and considers spatial uncertainty of fault probabilities, modeled by probability distributions. The methodology is demonstrated using preventive actions, such as additional network constraints and islanding, aiming to mitigate cascading failures in transmission networks. Their performance loss is compared to the traditional N-1 criterion. Simultaneous faults of up to three lines are considered as initiating cause in the IEEE 30-bus network and the 489-bus German transmission network to verify potential and scalability of the methodology. Results show that the decision-making methodology effectively identifies the best-performing action to reduce the risk of cascading failures for any level of uncertainty.