Optimization, Design, and Control of Robust Power Grids

美国电网是一种至关重要的国家资源--严重的电力中断将导致严重的经济损失；将影响关键的基础设施资源，如医院、交通网络和互联网；并将对国家安全产生重大影响。2003年8月，一场大停电影响了许多州，主要是东北部，造成了巨大的经济影响。如果停电持续时间更长，影响可能会严重得多。近年来，类似的停电也影响到了世界其他地区。已经相当清楚地确定，这些事件不是由于缺乏发电能力造成的。相反，它们是由传输网络中系统容错能力差造成的。换句话说，传输能力是紧张的；这一事实，再加上对网络动态的糟糕理解--特别是潜在的组合复杂性--以及不充分的实时技术，共同产生了完全级联的事件。我们工作的中心焦点将是使用运筹学和计算机科学的技术来开发高性能的算法计算实现，以解决大规模电网运行和管理中的关键问题。这项工作将包括方法论和实验，将处理长期规划模型，其中重点是以经济方式加强电网，使其能够稳健地抵御潜在故障；以及“在线”模型，其中快速算法允许网络在面对不断发展的级联时做出适当反应。

The U.S. Power Grid is a national resource of vital importance -- a severe disruption would cause severe economic damage; would affect critical infrastructure resources, such as hospitals, transportation networks, and the Internet; and would have significant impact on national security. In August, 2003, a large power blackout affected many states, principally in the Northeast, with large economic impact. Had the blackout laster longer the impact would likely have been far more severe. Similar blackouts have affected other parts of the world in recent years. It has been fairly clearly established that these events were not caused by a lack of generation power. Rather, they were caused by poor system fault tolerance in the transmission network. To put it differently, transmission capacity was tight; this fact, combined with poor understanding of the network dynamics -- in particular, the underlying combinatorial complexity-- and inadequate real-time techniques, conspired to generate fully cascading events.The central focus of our work will be to use techniques from Operations Research and Computer Science to develop high-performance computational implementations of algorithms that address critical problems in the operation and management of large-scale power grids. The work, which will include both methodology and and experimentation, will tackle long-term planning models, where the focus is on reinforcing a power grid in an economic manner so as to make it robust against potential faults; and ``online'' models, where a fast algorithm allows a network to appropriately react when facing a developing cascade.