A method for designing power supply chain networks accounting for failure scenarios and preventive maintenance

Abstract

A power grid is vulnerable and failures are inevitable. Failures decrease the power supply with an adverse effect on meeting the demand for electricity. Therefore, there is a need for a method to design power grid networks that result in the least possible disruption to the power supply when a failure occurs. In the literature, the focus has been on the design of the generation system without considering the transmission system or failures in the transmission system. Since power grids are integrated generation and transmission systems, each system will affect the other, so both generation and transmission systems need to be considered, as they are in this article. Methods developed for the structural modelling and analysis of supply chains are shown to be useful. The focus in this article is on describing a method using the supply chain construct for designing power grids that are relatively insensitive to failure in the integrated generation and transmission system. The efficacy of the method is illustrated using data from the Tehran Regional Electric Company. One of the findings is that targeted failures have a higher impact on decreasing the performance of the power grid than random failures. However, the focus is on the method rather than the results per se.

Keywords:

• power supply chain network
• robust design model
• random failure
• targeted failure

Acknowledgement

The assistance from Professors Peter Barker and Ronald Schleifer, in their valuable and careful revisions to the manuscript to simplify and clarify the English, is gratefully acknowledged.

Additional information

Funding

Support was received from NSF [grant number 1128826].