Dynamic Repair Scheduling for Transmission Systems Based on Look-Ahead Strategy Approximation

This paper intends to address the dynamic repair scheduling of electric power transmission systems based on look-ahead strategy approximation. The objective is to minimize system functionality loss during the restoration stage after disruptive events. A series of decisions regarding which damaged component to be repaired has to be made successively considering currently available information of repair time and its uncertainty in the future. To achieve this goal, the dynamic repair scheduling problem is represented as a stochastic Markovian decision process (MDP). To overcome the computational complexity of MDP derived from exponentially growing state space, the cost-to-go function is approximated by a look-ahead strategy based on repair importance ordering. Stage-dependent coefficients are used to balance the approximated functionality loss at different decision stages. The tradeoff between the efficiency and optimality can be achieved by adjusting the look-ahead depth and the updating policy of look-ahead strategy. The IEEE-14 and 118-bus systems were used for performance evaluation of the proposed method and comparison with various approaches. The results show that it can produce decisions close to the best-known solutions within small amount of time.