Gaming for Electric Power Grids

Goals

The reliability of electric power grids is challenged by the rapidly increasing frequency and severity of natural disasters.
This VIP is focused on the development of Current Crisis, a simulation style video game which puts the player in the role of a power system operator tasked with managing the grid during extreme events like wildfires and hurricanes. The game is developed in Unity with grid optimization simulations in Gurobi, and is planned to be playable via browser. View a recent build hosted on itch here.
The project primarily aims to educate the public about critical power grid infrastructure, sustainable energy development, and the tradeoffs in grid design and disaster mitigation. Future iterations will use data collected from players to train machine learning algorithms to help engineers better prepare for and respond to actual disaster scenarios.

Issues Involved or Addressed

Operators of electric power systems must address the rapidly increasing frequency of severe natural disasters driven by accelerating climate change. Research efforts have developed many approaches for mitigating the impacts of natural disasters, such as shutting off power lines to avoid igniting wildfires and hardening electric infrastructure by installing seawalls and microgrids as well as undergrounding power lines.
Practical implementations of these approaches require outreach to build public acceptance of the associated disruptive actions and expenses. Another implementation challenge is the lack of detailed datasets containing plausible solutions to resilience-related optimization problems, which would be valuable for training machine learning models. By developing and publicizing a simulation-style video game, this project will simultaneously address both of these challenges, thus improving the resilience of our electric infrastructure.

Partners/Sponsors

The video games will be complementary to work for the NSF-funded AI Institute for Advances in Optimization (AI4Opt, www.ai4opt.org) and to research efforts at Sandia National Laboratories.Additionally, the VIP works closely with the Seth Bonder Summer Camp program, with student developers creating educational modules about game production for the high school students attending the summer camps held on campus.Previously, the VIP has partnered with Dr. Jessica Roberts from the School of Interactive Computing to display a demo of the game at the Dataseum in the Crosland exhibition space.