Wiley Handbook of Science and Technology for Homeland Security, 4 Volume Set

OBJECT-ORIENTED APPROACHES FOR INTEGRATED ANALYSIS OF INTERDEPENDENT ENERGY NETWORKS

RODRIGO PALMA-BEHNKE AND LUIS S. VARGAS

Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Chile, Santiago, Chile

1 INTRODUCTION

In many fields, there is a growing interest for tools to study the interdependencies of different areas of activity or production. Driven forces in this process have been security, economy, and environmental problems, where the cross effects of policies are highly linked [1]. In the literature, an important part of the investigation is dedicated to the study of critical infrastructure in order to prevent possible catastrophes [2], whereas another line of research is given by environmentally sustainable development [3, 4]. The underlying objective of those works is to study the cross effects of policies in different fields in order to measure their effect on environmental conditions [5]. All these studies recognize the high complexity of the problem, which is characterized by multiple agents and decision makers, large-scale systems with numerous components, nonlinear coupled subsystems, spatially distributed, adaptive in time, and investment decisions of discrete nature. Another aspect of complexity is the need of know-how integration of different disciplines. The mathematical formulation of these problems usually leads to extremely complex systems. In addition, the trend of market liberalization toward decentralized decision process has increased even further the complexity ...