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Post-Disaster Microgrid Formation for Enhanced Distribution System Resilience

Conference ·

This paper proposes a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based approach for post-disaster critical load restoration in active distribution systems to form microgrids through network reconfiguration to minimize critical load curtailments. Distribution networks are represented as graph networks, and optimal network configurations with microgrids are obtained by searching for the optimal spanning forest. The constraints to the research question being explored are the radial topology and power balance. Unlike existing analytical and population-based approaches, which necessitate the repetition of entire analyses and computation for each outage scenario to find the optimal spanning forest, the proposed approach, once properly trained, can quickly determine the optimal, or near-optimal, spanning forest even when outage scenarios change. When multiple lines fail in the system, the proposed approach forms microgrids with distributed energy resources in active distribution systems to reduce critical load curtailment. The proposed DRL-based model learns the action-value function using the REINFORCE algorithm, which is a model-free reinforcement learning technique based on stochastic policy gradients. A case study was conducted on a 33-node distribution test system, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach for post-disaster critical load restoration.

Research Organization:
National Renewable Energy Lab. (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)
DOE Contract Number:
AC36-08GO28308
OSTI ID:
1924019
Report Number(s):
NREL/CP-5R00-85275; MainId:86048; UUID:521e1514-f105-4323-b38e-a2b72f2e4e07; MainAdminID:68698
Resource Relation:
Conference: Presented at 2022 Resilience Week (RWS), 26-29 September 2022, National Harbor, Maryland
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

References (16)

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