Evaluation of Horizon of Viability Optimization Engine for Sustained Power to Critical Infrastructure

In the aftermath of increasingly frequent catastrophic events, a typical scenario is critical infrastructure (CI) units being supported by available backup sources with a weak power grid that can be intermittent or absent. Such a scenario is significantly challenging in the sense of providing reliable supply of power to CI units. In this article, an intelligent optimization scheme, termed a horizon of viability (HoV) engine, is developed to guarantee the viability of a sustained, reliable supply of power to the CI units over a time horizon. The proposed HoV engine generates a cost-optimal portfolio of the locally available generation sources and the loads over a time horizon using a mixed-integer convex programming problem. A controller-hardware-in-the-loop (CHIL) platform is developed to evaluate the control performance of the HoV engine. The experimental results corroborate the efficacy in maintaining the viability of the CI units after a grid interruption event. Further, the proposed HoV optimization scheme performs better than existing net-load management schemes in the literature.