Abstract: Establishing an electric power emergency response mechanism is of great significance for improving the emergency support capability of a power system. Efficiently dispatching mobile emergency power sources in the event of a power outage is an important part of the emergency response, and can reduce the losses caused by the power outage. There are some uncertain factors associated with a power outage event and the corresponded emergency response procedure, such as the travelling time of mobile emergency power sources and the power shortage value of important users during a power outage event. These uncertain factors have not yet been systematically taken into consideration by most of the existing related publications. Given this background, a robust optimal scheduling method for mobile emergency power sources considering uncertainties is proposed. Firstly, the interval number is used to represent the uncertain factors, and an optimization model is established with the objective formulated as the minimization of the total outage losses of important users. Then, the nonlinear terms in the optimization model are linearized by introducing auxiliary decision variables, and the model is thus transformed into a mixed integer linear programming problem. Next, a robust optimization method based on the fluctuation range of the acceptable solution is proposed to attain a more reasonable solution compared with the pessimistic solutions which are conservative in most scenarios. Finally, numerical results are carried out to demonstrate that the uncertain factors in the optimal dispatch of mobile emergency power sources can be well considered by the proposed model and then an effective scheduling scheme attained.

Key words:  mobile emergency power source, optimal scheduling, robust optimization, uncertainty, interval number