On the Value of Community Association for Microgrid Development: Learnings from Multiple Deterministic and Stochastic Planning Designs

The reliability of the power grid is a constant problem faced by those who operate, plan and study power systems. An alternative approach to this problem, and others related to the integration of renewable energy sources, is the microgrid. This research seeks to quantify the potential benefits of urban community microgrids, based on the development of planning models with deterministic and stochastic optimization approaches. The models ensure that supply meets demand whilst assuring the minimum cost of investment and operation. To verify their effectiveness, the planning of hundreds of microgrids was set in the city of Santiago de Chile. The most important results highlight the value of community association, such as: a reduction in investment cost of up to 35%, when community microgrids are planned with a desired level of reliability, compared to single residential household microgrids. This reduction is due to the diversity of energy consumption, which can represent around 20%, on average, of cost reduction, and to the Economies of Scale (EoS) present in the aggregation microgrid asset capacity, which can represent close to 15% of the additional reduction in investment costs. The stochastic planning approach also ensures that a community can prepare for different fault scenarios in the power grid. Furthermore, it was found that for approximately 90% of the planned microgrids with reliability requirements, the deterministic solution for the worst three fault scenarios is equivalent to the solution of the stochastic planning problem.

Design and development of the trailers optimal allocation and schedule model in the supply chain system with considering cross dock with stochastic planning

Todays, transportation, and logistics engineering processes are among the important issues of organizations in the competitive market. Considering the logistical structure of the logistics engineering and the more attention paid to the logistical tools and, in particular, such as the use of these tools, such as containers (pallets, containers, etc.), transportation equipment (trailer, forklift trucks, etc.), and The art of building the supply and distribution network concerning the main warehouses, cross-dock, and temporary storage, is one of the most critical and contemplative cases. In fact, all these tools work together to maximize system efficiency in the field of logistics concerning the leading impact indicators, including the time of shipment (loading, disloading, the allocation of trailers, etc.). This paper's main goal is to present and develop a mathematical model of trailer schedule planning in possible conditions in the cross-dock. In fact, the main function of this mathematical model is to minimize the total time of the logistics process from the stage of emptying the pallets from the materials producers in the cross docks and assigning the trailer to the door, and finally reloading the pallets to be distributed to the production sites. To solve this model and to analyze the outputs, mixed integer programming was used by GAMS software.