Abstract
The increase in extreme weather events induced by climate change, and
their impact on power systems, has created a need for tools that can
assess and improve system resilience. To meet this need, the R&D team
of the Energy System Consulting segment of Tractebel Engineering GmbH
has developed a novel tool called reXplan. ReXplan is a Python library
for resilient electrical system planning under extreme hazard events,
such as windstorms, earthquakes, floods, wildfire, etc. It is designed
to help power system operators and planners make better-informed
decisions to create more resilient and secure power grids. This paper
provides an overview of reXplan’s main features, architecture,
methodology of analysis and metrics. ReXplan is capable of modeling both
spatiotemporal extreme events and electrical power systems. It
leverages technologies and techniques such as Julia/JuMP package and
sequential Monte Carlo analysis with multivariate stratified sampling
to achieve high accuracy in the results while reducing computational
load. By quantifying resiliency metrics, comparing different planning
strategies, and validating technical solutions, reXplan can help reduce
the risks of severe outages in the grid. The software can be easily
integrated into common data science environments and is available as a
Python library. For computationally intensive tasks, such as optimal
power flow, reXplan is exploiting the fast speed of Julia programming
language, using PowerModels.jl as backend.