Brownout Based Blackout Avoidance Strategies in Smart Grids

Power shortage is a serious issue especially in third world countries, and is traditionally handled through rolling blackouts. Today, smart grids provide the opportunity of avoiding complete blackouts by converting them to brownouts, which allow selective provisioning of power supply to support essential loads while curtailing supply to less critical loads. In this work, we formulate brownout based power distribution scheduling as an optimization problem and propose a modified Dynamic Programming (DP) based optimal algorithm (suitable for moderate sized grids) that is 9 to 40 times faster than the conventional DP approach.