Strategic Planning for Power System Restoration

This talk considers how to restore electric power systems after a natural or man-made disaster. Such a restoration is extremely challenging from a computational standpoint as it combines a complex logistics problem with activation problems over a complex physical system. We present a four-step approach which allows us to separate the logistic and restoration aspects, while ensuring an overall high quality restoration. The approach, which heavily exploits hybrid optimization, is validated on benchmarks using realistic power system data. The experimental results show significant improvements over the practice in the field and the critical role of hybrid optimization to find high-quality solutions in reasonable time. (Joint work with Carleton Coffrin and Pascal van Hentenryck)

Speaker/Performer: Russell Bent, Los Alamos National Laboratory