Joint Assessment and Restoration of Power Systems

This paper studies the joint damage assessment and recovery of the power infrastructure after a natural disaster has occurred. Earlier work in this area proposed an optimization algorithm for the recovery phase, assuming that the infrastructure damage was known precisely. This paper lifts this assumption which does not always hold in practice. It proposes three approaches to this problem: An online stochastic optimization algorithm, a 2-stage algorithm that first evaluates the damage and then perform restoration, and a hybridization of both approaches. Each of these approaches use information produced by weather and fragility simulation tools that provide potential damage scenarios for the disaster. Experimental results on natural disaster scenarios for the US infrastructure indicate that online stochastic combinatorial optimization provides high-quality solutions to the joint damage assessment and recovery problem.