Rachel Moglen

selected publications

1. Optimal restoration of power infrastructure following a disaster with environmental hazards

   Rachel Moglen, Benjamin D. Leibowicz, Alexis Kwasinski, and Grant Cruse

   Socio-Economic Planning Sciences 2024

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   After a disaster, the power grid helps support infrastructure systems that are essential to the recovery effort in addition to the critical services it provides every day. This paper provides an approach for optimal power grid restoration in disaster contexts with environmental hazards. These hazards, such as unstable structures, smoke, chemical hazards, and abnormal radioactivity, may pose acute and accumulating risks to repair workers and impede the restoration process. We therefore formulate a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) that generates an optimal restoration plan with constraints imposed by acute and accumulating environmental hazards. We also develop a heuristic inspired by trends that we observe in optimal restoration strategies, and we compare its performance to that of an optimal restoration strategy. For our case study, we model a stylized disaster that approximates the patterns of a number of disasters including earthquakes, fires, industrial facility explosions, or nuclear reactor incidents. We analyze the performance of the heuristic and optimal restoration strategies on a modified IEEE 123-bus test network. We find that the optimal restoration strategy is able to restore power service more quickly than the heuristic strategy while also exposing repair workers to less acute and cumulative environmental hazards. We also find that as disaster severity increases, the performance difference between the heuristic and optimal restoration strategies grows. Finally, our results show that both the optimal and heuristic algorithms can be useful tools for identifying vulnerable regions of a power grid.

   @article{Moglen2024_PowerRestoration,
     title = {Optimal restoration of power infrastructure following a disaster with environmental hazards},
     journal = {Socio-Economic Planning Sciences},
     volume = {95},
     pages = {101974},
     year = {2024},
     issn = {0038-0121},
     doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.seps.2024.101974},
     url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0038012124001733},
     author = {Moglen, Rachel and Leibowicz, Benjamin D. and Kwasinski, Alexis and Cruse, Grant},
     keywords = {Disaster recovery, Restoration, Optimization, Power systems, Resilience},
   }

2. The State of Macro-Energy Systems Research: Common Critiques, Current Progress, and Research Priorities

   Rachel Moglen, Kiran Prakash Chawla, Patricia Levi, Yinong Sun, Oladoyin Phillips, Benjamin D. Leibowicz, Jesse D. Jenkins, and Emily A. Grubert

   iScience 2023

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   The growing field of macro-energy systems (MES) brings together the interdisciplinary community of researchers studying the equitable and low-carbon future of humanity’s energy systems. As MES matures as a community of scholars, a coherent consensus about the key challenges and future directions of the field can be lacking. This paper is a response to this need. In this paper, we first discuss the primary critiques of model-based MES research that have emerged since MES was proposed as a way to unify related interdisciplinary research. We discuss these critiques and current efforts to address them by the coalescing MES community. We then outline future directions for growth motivated by these critiques. These research priorities include both best practices for the community and methodological improvements.

   @article{Moglen2023_MESCritiquesFrontiers,
     title = {The State of Macro-Energy Systems Research: Common Critiques, Current Progress, and Research Priorities},
     journal = {iScience},
     author = {Moglen, Rachel and Chawla, Kiran Prakash and Levi, Patricia and Sun, Yinong and Phillips, Oladoyin and Leibowicz, Benjamin D. and Jenkins, Jesse D. and Grubert, Emily A.},
     pages = {106325},
     year = {2023},
     issn = {2589-0042},
     doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2023.106325},
     url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589004223004029},
     keywords = {Macro-energy systems, Energy and climate policy, Decarbonization, Energy modeling, Climate change},
   }

3. A Nexus Approach to Infrastructure Resilience Planning under Uncertainty

   Rachel Moglen, Julius Barth, Shagun Gupta, Eiji Kawai, Katherine Klise, and Benjamin D. Leibowicz

   Reliability Engineering & System Safety 2023

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   Natural disasters pose serious threats to Critical Infrastructure (CI) systems like power and drinking water, sometimes disrupting service for days, weeks, or months. Decision makers can mitigate this risk by hardening CI systems through actions like burying power lines and installing backup generation for water pumping. However, the inherent uncertainty in natural disasters coupled with the high costs of hardening activities make disaster planning a challenging task. We develop a disaster planning framework that recommends asset-specific hardening projects across interdependent power and water networks facing the uncertainty of natural disasters. We demonstrate the utility of our model by applying it to Guayama, Puerto Rico, focusing on the risk posed by hurricanes. Our results show that our proposed optimization approach identifies hardening decisions that maintain a high level of service post-disaster. The results also emphasize power system hardening due to the dependency of the water system on power for water treatment and a higher vulnerability of the power network to hurricane damage. Finally, choosing optimal hardening decisions by hedging with respect to all potential hurricane scenarios and their probabilities produces results that perform better on extreme events and are less variable compared to optimizing for only the average hurricane scenario.

   @article{Moglen2023_NexusResilience,
     title = {A Nexus Approach to Infrastructure Resilience Planning under Uncertainty},
     journal = {Reliability Engineering & System Safety},
     volume = {230},
     pages = {108931},
     year = {2023},
     issn = {0951-8320},
     doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ress.2022.108931},
     url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0951832022005464},
     author = {Moglen, Rachel and Barth, Julius and Gupta, Shagun and Kawai, Eiji and Klise, Katherine and Leibowicz, Benjamin D.},
     keywords = {Infrastructure hardening, Resilience, Stochastic optimization, Disaster planning, Critical infrastructure systems, Energy-water nexus},
   }