A Tri-Level Planning Approach to Resilient Expansion and Hardening of Coupled Power Distribution and Transportation Systems

Natural disasters such as major storms or hurricanes can seriously threaten the resilience of large and coupled infrastructures such as power distribution and transportation systems. This paper proposes a planning (i.e., investment + operation) method for presenting the enhanced resilience of coupled transportation and power distribution systems. The proposed investment method includes capacity expansion of power lines, roads, and charging stations, and the hardening of roads and power lines. A tri-level problem is proposed and formulated to accommodate random natural disasters. The proposed model is solved by applying Benders decomposition and column-and-constraint (C&CG) algorithms. Benders decomposition will decompose the tri-level coupled problem into a single-level master problem and bi-level subproblem. However, the latter with binary variables is not a convex problem and cannot be converted to the max problem. The C&CG algorithm is applied to solve the bi-level subproblem with binary variables. The proposed resilience enhancement algorithm is tested and numerical results are provided for coupled transportation and power distribution systems with 21 electric buses and 20 roads, to validate the effectiveness of the proposed planning method.