Pre-disaster transmission maintenance scheduling considering network topology optimization

Several devastating experiences with extreme natural disasters demonstrate that improving power system resilience is becoming increasingly important. This paper proposes a pre-disaster transmission maintenance scheduling considering network topology optimization to ensure the power system economics before disasters and power system resilience during disasters. The transmission line fragility is distinguished and considered in the proposed optimization model to determine the maintenance scheduling of defective lines that minimizes load shedding during disasters. The proposed model is established as a tri-level optimization problem that is further reformulated to a bi-level problem utilizing duality theory. The column-and-constraint generation (C&CG) algorithm is employed to solve the equivalent robust optimization problem. Finally, the proposed model and its solution algorithm are implemented on the modified IEEE RTS-79 system. The significant cost savings and increased resilience illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.