Advanced Grid Modeling Project on Optimized Resilience for Distribution and Transmission Systems

This project rigorously integrates individual elements of transmission and distribution modeling developed in past projects into a comprehensive formulation of a joint transmission and distribution planning problem including a resiliency model to couple the two systems with conditions associated with extreme events. This comprehensive formulation creates the basis for joint resource management dispatch that goes far beyond scenario-driven, co-simulation methods. However, the resulting formulation is nonlinear and non-convex, making it computationally difficult to solve to global optimality. The project will develop robust and efficient algorithms to find high-quality local optima as well as methods based on relaxations and approximations to obtain optimality guarantees. The key approach is expected to be a combination of formulations, i.e., utilizing relaxed formulations to quickly and reliably obtain feasible bounds, and ultimately using those bounds in nonlinear formulations to obtain optimal AC solutions to the optimization problem. A new decomposition framework will be able to leverage the natural separable structure between transmission and distribution systems. This approach is expected to be based on a novel smoothing technique derived from primal-dual interior point methods. The decomposition will also make it possible to exploit parallel computing resources very effectively.