Towards Risk-Informed Transmission Grid Outage Planning

Power grid outage planning is a class of preventive maintenance (PM) problems whose main objective is the optimal allocation of maintenance activities, such as component repairs, refurbishments, and upgrades. To ensure safe operations during maintenance, N-1 security constraints are commonly enforced, creating robust preventive maintenance plans against single-component failures. While uncertainty has been addressed extensively in the PM optimization literature, many grid outage planning approaches are deterministic. Deterministic security-constrained outage planning problems, due to their combinatorial nature, are challenging problems, and incorporating uncertainty can further increase the computational burden and challenge numerical tractability. However, omitting sources of uncertainty can compromise the cost-effectiveness and safety of the plan. This work addresses this gap by introducing a risk-informed approach to power grid outage planning that accounts for operational and planning uncertainties. We present an illustrative case study of a planning problem under uncertainty based on our previous work on risk-informed optimisation.We discuss the benefits and drawbacks of the proposed risk-informed approach and speculate on further extensions for power grid outage planning and related problems.

Keywords: Power grid, Outage scheduling, Uncertainty, Risk, Maintenance, Optimization.