Field teams coordination for earthquake-damaged distribution system energization


IŞIK İ., AYDIN GÖL E.

Reliability Engineering and System Safety, vol.245, 2024 (SCI-Expanded) identifier identifier identifier

  • Publication Type: Article / Article
  • Volume: 245
  • Publication Date: 2024
  • Doi Number: 10.1016/j.ress.2024.110050
  • Journal Name: Reliability Engineering and System Safety
  • Journal Indexes: Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED), Scopus, Academic Search Premier, PASCAL, Aerospace Database, Communication Abstracts, Compendex, INSPEC, Metadex, zbMATH, Civil Engineering Abstracts
  • Keywords: Decision support, Disaster management, Markov decision process, Power networks, Stochastic systems
  • Middle East Technical University Affiliated: Yes

Abstract

The re-energization of electrical distribution systems in a post-disaster scenario is of grave importance as most modern infrastructure systems rely heavily on the presence of electricity. This paper introduces a method to coordinate the field teams for the optimal energization of an electrical distribution system after an earthquake-induced blackout. The proposed method utilizes a Markov Decision Process (MDP) to create an optimal energization strategy, which aims to minimize the expected time to energize each distribution system component. The travel duration of each team and the possible outcomes of the energization attempts are considered in the state transitions. The failure probabilities of the system components are computed using the fragility curves of structures and the Peak Ground Acceleration (PGA) values which are encoded to the MDP model via transition probabilities. Furthermore, the proposed solution offers several methods to determine the non-optimal actions during the construction of the MDP and eliminate them in order to improve the run-time performance without sacrificing the optimality of the solution.