Communication-Constrained Expansion Planning for Resilient Distribution Systems

Distributed generation and remotely controlled switches have emerged as important technologies to improve the resiliency of distribution grids against extreme weather-related disturbances. Therefore it becomes impor- tant to study how best to place them on the grid in order to meet a resiliency criteria, while minimizing costs and capturing their dependencies on the associated communication systems that sustains their distributed operations. This paper introduces the Optimal Resilient Design Problem for Distribution and Communi- cation Systems (ORDPDC) to address this need. The ORDPDC is formulated as a two-stage stochastic mixed-integer program that captures the physical laws of distribution systems, the communication connec- tivity of the smart grid components, and a set of scenarios which specifies which components are affected by potential disasters. The paper proposes an exact branch-and-price algorithm for the ORDPDC which features a strong lower bound and a variety of acceleration schemes to address degeneracy. The ORDPDC model and branch-and-price algorithm were evaluated on a variety of test cases with varying disaster inten- sities and network topologies. The results demonstrate the significant impact of the network topologies on the expansion plans and costs, as well as the computational benefits of the proposed approach.