Locating Microgrids to Improve Smart City Resilience

Determining the best location and configuration of microgrids to support post-disaster critical infrastructure operation in smart cities is a significant issue for policymakers and electric system planners. In this paper, we propose a two-phase approach to locating microgrids to increase critical infrastructure resilience. In the first phase, we consider how to prioritize critical infrastructure components in smart cities using either a normalized combination of characteristics or a ranked list of lists method. Numerical results show that the two methods give similar results. In the second phase, we propose to combine prioritization information across multiple infrastructures geographically to identify potential locations for microgrids. A simple heuristic for location of a microgrid is proposed and compared with an optimization model that seeks to find the location that minimizes a weighted combination of prioritization information and cost.