An Ecological Robustness-Oriented Approach for Power System Network Expansion

Power systems are critical infrastructure for reliable and secure electric energy delivery. Incidents are increasing, as unexpected multiple hazards ranging from natural disasters to cyberattacks threaten the security and functionality of society. Inspired by resilient ecosystems, this paper presents a resilient network design approach with an ecological robustness (R ECO )-oriented optimization to improve power systems' ability to maintain a secure operating state throughout unknown hazards. The approach uses R ECO , a surprisal -based metric that captures key features of an ecosystem's resilient structure, as an objective to strategically design the electrical network. The approach enables solvability and practicality by introducing a stochastic-based candidate branch creation algorithm and a Taylor series expansion for relaxation of the R ECO formulation. Finally, studies are conducted on the R ECO -oriented approach using the IEEE 24 Bus RTS and the ACTIVSg200 systems. Results demonstrate improvement of the system's reliability under multiple hazards, network properties of robust structure and equally distributed power flows, and survivability against cascading failures. From the analysis, we observe that a more redundant network structure with equally distributed power flows benefits its resilience.