Proactive repair crew deployment to improve transmission system resilience against hurricanes

Extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, impose severe impacts on power systems. A rapid repair for power systems is desired after hurricanes pass to mitigate load-shedding losses. This study proposes a proactive repair crew deployment model to prepare for post-disaster repair and restoration. A two-stage stochastic optimisation framework is designed. In the first stage, the repair crews are allocated to candidate locations ahead of a hurricane. In the second stage, the repair dispatch and load restoration are implemented under several damage scenarios to support the first-stage decision-making. A novel repair crew routing method is proposed which considers repair crew cooperation on important damaged components to enable earlier restoration of critical load. A linear-programming approximation of AC power flow is applied to model the restoration of the transmission system in which the generator start-up characters and security constraints are incorporated. A scenario-based decomposition algorithm is applied to solve the stochastic problem and a preprocessing method to identify necessary components is proposed to further reduce computation time. Case studies validate the effectiveness of the proposed model in improving transmission system resilience.