Title: Resilience of electricity systems: An ABM approach in understanding resilience of large scale sociotechnical systems
Abstract: Large scale sociotechnical systems such as electricity systems will have to deal with the effects of climate change. Constant effort keeps this system operational as much as possible. Traditional metrics can tell us something about the system such as the amount of power that is generated or consumed, or the amount of consumers whose needs are not being met. These metrics generally tell us something about a part of the configuration of the system. Other metrics, like robustness, tell us something about the whole system. In this case it tells us something about the degree to which a system can withstand a certain disturbance. Resilience is such a concept. It is a term that is often applied to ecological systems and it is comparable to robustness in that is looks at the whole system configuration. Specifically it says something about the ability of a system to stay in a certain set of system configurations, called an attractor. Even when the system is disturbed slightly. If the disturbance is large enough in these systems however, the system may move away from its current attractor, and end up in a different set of system configurations, another attractor. This behaviour is not exclusive to ecological systems. Sociotechnical systems also often show this behaviour. This makes resilience interesting to us. It could tell us something about the ability of an electricity system to stay in an attractor while under the effects of climate change or what types of configurations exist in the attractors of this system. In this thesis the ecological definition of resilience is translated to be appropriate for sociotechnical systems, the new definition is explored on its usefulness in its application to sociotechnical systems and an understanding of resilience is built up. The definition proposed is: “Resilience of an electricity system is the capacity of this system to manage shifts between attractors while being exposed to the effects of a disturbance”. The efforts in understanding this definition consist of several parts including building up an understanding of attractors, application to and exploration with a multitude of agent based models and looking at the degree to which t-SNE is able to operationalize it as well as proposing and briefly analyzing some alternative methods for doing this.
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot