Approaches to Shipboard Power Management

Shipboard power grid reconfiguration is a key ingredient for survivability, under adverse conditions, and for efficient grid operation. Two requirements surface if the procedure is to be implemented close to real time. First, the complicated dynamics of the system must be accurately modeled by a simpler equivalent model. Second, a constrained optimization problem has to be solved very rapidly. The second objective's challenge grows exponentially with the number of possible switch states. Both discrete integer optimization techniques and stochastic algorithms have been successfully examined in this regard. A new and promising technique involves partial variable solutions; a subset of the solution space is treated as known and the global solution approached iteratively. The technique shows a 60: 1 speed up in solution on a test grid with 16 million possible configurations.