Reliability Engineering and Services

12Resilience Engineering and Management

12.1 Introduction

Unlike reliability issues, events considered in resilience management possess two unique features: (i) high impact with low probability of occurrence and (ii) catastrophic damages resulting from cascading failure. For instance, the 2012 Hurricane Sandy inflicted nearly $69 billion in damage to the east coast of the US, resulting in power outage for weeks or even a month in certain affected areas. Hence, enhancing the resilience of engineering systems like the electric grid and transportation networks against extreme events (such as hurricanes) becomes a fundamental task for engineers and policy makers. This chapter introduces the resilience concept, modeling method, and design strategies with the focus on the power grid system. Section 12.2 introduces the concept of a resilience curve from which several performance measures are derived. Section 12.3 compares the difference between reliability and resilience perceived from power grid operation, and probabilistic models simulating the hurricane landing characteristics are provided. Section 12.4 elucidates three design aspects of a resilience system, namely prevention, survivability, and recovery. In Section 12.5, we use moment methods and stochastic models to characterize the intermittency of wind and solar generation, and the demand response program. Section 12.6 solves a distributed generation planning problem with two objectives: (i) improving grid protection and survivability ...