Reflection on Early Lessons for Urban Resilience and Public Health Enhancement during the COVID-19

With growing impacts on public health systems and economies across the world, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, we need to reflect on some of the early lessons for urban resilience enhancement. In this paper, a brief discussion is made through several recommendations that could make our cities more prepared specially in the probable future waves of this current outbreak or potential spikes in infections or clustered cases. The experiences from global examples highlighted in this study address what has worked in the past few months at the spatial levels of communities and cities. The COVID-19 outbreak highlighted the deficiencies and shortfall across multiple sectors of the urban systems and enabled us to identify risks, challenges, and pathways to better city management. With regard to urban resilience enhancement, the negative impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak are assessed to suggest a checklist of what could be done through early preparedness. The findings are novel in ongoing research related to urban resilience and public health during the COVID-19 pandemic. The early lessons here reflect on the ongoing situation of this pandemic outbreak, but could effectually help to enhance the resilience of our cities and communities, and especially addressing the protection of public health and societal well-being. The findings contribute to major sectors of urban resilience, city management, and public health. The recommendations from this study could be utilised and adapted in any context, allowing for the consideration of all-inclusive decision-making and much-enhanced planning processes.

Cyber-Physical Resilience Enhancement for Power Transmission Systems with Energy Storage Systems

In a power system, when extreme events occur, such as ice storm, large scale blackouts may be unavoidable. Such small probability but high risk events have huge impact on power systems. Most resilience research in power systems only considers faults on the physical side, which would lead to overly idealistic results. This paper proposes a two-stage cyber-physical resilience enhancement method considering energy storage (ES) systems. The first stage calculates optimal planning of ES systems, and the second stage assesses resilience and enhancement of ES systems during the disaster. In the proposed model, cyber faults indirectly damage the system by disabling monitoring and control function of control center. As a result, when detection and response process of physical faults are blocked by cyber failures, serious load shedding occurs. Such a cyber-physical coupling mechanism of fault, response, restoration process is demonstrated in the modified IEEE Reliable Test System-79 (RTS-79). Simulation results show compared with the physical-only system, the cyber-physical system has a more accurate but degraded resilient performance. Besides, ES systems setting at proper place effectively enhance resilience of the cyber-physical transmission system with less load Shedding.

Resilience-oriented Restoration Strategy by Offshore Wind Power Considering Risk

Global climate changes have created intense naturaldisasters such as typhoons, which may cause serious damage topower systems. As an emerging renewable energy resource, offshore wind power has great potential in power systems resilienceenhancement with its rapid start-up capability and developmentof anti-typhoon technology. In this paper, a restoration strategyby offshore wind power considering risk is proposed to speedup the restoration process and enhance system resilience. Specifically, a failure risk model of an individual wind turbine andthen the whole wind farm is built for predicting severe weather’simpact, with focus on failure probability. Further, a quantificationmodel of resilience enhancement and risk cost, based on customerinterruption cost assessment method, is introduced. Then, a twostage optimized decision-making model is proposed to solve thescheme of offshore wind power and conventional power unitsin load restoration process. Case studies are undertaken on amodified IEEE RTS-79 system and results indicate the proposedrestoration strategy can shorten duration of restoration andreduce customers’ economic losses meanwhile ensuring systemsafety.

Resilient Power Systems Operation with Offshore Wind Farms and Cloud Data Centers

To enhance the resilience of power systems with offshore wind farms(OWFs),a proactive scheduling scheme is proposed to unlock the flexibility of cloud data centers(CDCs)responding to uncertain spatial and temporal impacts induced by hurricanes.The total life simulation(TLS)is adopted to project the local weather conditions at transmission lines and OWFs,before,during,and after the hurricane.The static power curve of wind turbines(WTs)is used to capture the output of OWFs,and the fragility analysis of transmission-line components is used to formulate the time-varying failure rates of transmission lines.A novel distributionally robust ambiguity set is constructed with a discrete support set,where the impacts of hurricanes are depicted by these supports.To minimize load sheddings and dropping workloads,the spatial and temporal demand response capabilities of CDCs according to task migration and delay tolerance are incorporated into resilient management.The flexibilities of CDC’s power consumption are integrated into a two-stage distributionally robust optimization problem with conditional value at risk(CVaR).Based on Lagrange duality,this problem is reformulated into its deterministic counterpart and solved by a novel decomposition method with hybrid cuts,admitting fewer iterations and a faster convergence rate.The effectiveness of the proposed resilient management strategy is verified through case studies conducted on the modified IEEERTS 24 system,which includes 4 data centers and 5 offshore wind farms.