Metrics and Quantification of Operational and Infrastructure Resilience in Power Systems

TLDR

Resilience to high‑impact, low‑probability events such as extreme weather is increasingly critical for global critical infrastructures, yet power systems lack a clear methodology or metrics to quantify operational and infrastructure resilience. This study introduces a resilience trapezoid that extends the traditional resilience triangle to capture the distinct phases a power system undergoes during an extreme event, and defines operational and infrastructure resilience concepts. The trapezoid is quantified with time‑dependent resilience metrics that track degradation and recovery across event phases, and the framework evaluates structural and operational enhancement strategies on a 29‑bus Great Britain transmission network under single and multiple severe windstorm scenarios. Results demonstrate that the proposed framework and metrics successfully quantify power‑system resilience and assess the effectiveness of enhancement strategies.

Abstract

Resilience to high impact low probability events is becoming of growing concern, for instance to address the impacts of extreme weather on critical infrastructures worldwide. However, there is, as yet, no clear methodology or set of metrics to quantify resilience in the context of power systems and in terms of both operational and infrastructure integrity. In this paper, the resilience “trapezoid” is therefore introduced which extends the resilience “triangle” that is traditionally used in existing studies, in order to consider the different phases that a power system may experience during an extreme event. The resilience trapezoid is then quantified using time-dependent resilience metrics that are specifically introduced to help capture the critical system degradation and recovery features associated to the trapezoid for different temporal phases of an event. Further, we introduce the concepts of operational resilience and infrastructure resilience to gain additional insights in the system response. Different structural and operational resilience enhancement strategies are then analyzed using the proposed assessment framework, considering single and multiple severe windstorm events that hit the 29-bus Great Britain transmission network test case. The results clearly highlight the capability of the proposed framework and metrics to quantify power system resilience and relevant enhancement strategies.