GOALI: Coordination of Resilience Interventions by Consumers and the Supply Utility (CRICSU)

Ohio State University, The, Columbus OH

Investigators

Abstract

This NSF project aims to develop a methodology to improve in a coordinated manner the resilience of a power distribution system to supply electricity and the resilience of proactive consumers to supply their individual electricity demands. The project will bring transformative change by providing a bilevel optimization framework that, for given resilience improvement budgets, allows achieving maximum resilience for the distribution system as a whole and the maximum individual resilience level for each proactive consumer. This will be achieved by significantly improving current algorithms to solve bilevel optimization problems. Such improvements will be accomplished by leveraging novel relaxation and decomposition techniques to derive tractable optimization problems that accurately reflect the physical and economic laws involved. The intellectual merits of the project include the detailed modeling of the interrelated resilience problems of the agents to coordinate their conflicting objectives, and the development of techniques to solve bilevel problems whose lower-level problems are nonconvex and/or non-continuous. The broader impacts of the project include the application of the proposed methodology to critical infrastructures other than power systems, such as natural-gas and water systems, the availability of efficient algorithms to solve complex bilevel problems, which can be used in many disciplines, and the education of graduate and undergraduate students. Pursuing resilience enhancement, we plan to develop a novel hierarchical decision-making framework (an optimization problem that includes as constraints other optimization problems) for different electric power agents interacting through an electricity distribution system. Such decision framework enables identifying effective solutions that are optimal for both the leading partner, the electric utility, and the other agents, proactive consumers and non-proactive consumers, that react to the decisions of the leading agent. We will develop and tailor such framework to the case of a power distribution system, representing in detail the physical laws governing such system. Resilience improvement interventions mainly include installing battery energy storage systems, smart switches, distributed generators, and converting overhead distribution lines to underground lines. The novel decision framework translates into a complex bilevel optimization problem that we plan to characterize and solve by leveraging novel decomposition and convex relaxation techniques. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.