Strategic stockpiling of power system supplies for disaster recovery

This paper studies the Power System Stochastic Storage Problem (PSSSP), a novel application in power restoration which consists of deciding how to store power system components throughout a populated area to maximize the amount of power served after disaster restoration. The paper proposes an exact mixed-integer formulation for the linearized DC power flow model and a general column-generation approach. Both formulations were evaluated experimentally on real-life benchmarks. The results show that the column-generation algorithm produces near-optimal solutions quickly and produces orders of magnitude speedups over the exact formulation for large benchmarks. Moreover, both the exact and the column-generation formulations produce significant improvements over a greedy approach and hence should yield significant benefits in practice.