A Bi-Layer TSN Formulation for Separable Scheduling of Mobile Emergency Resources

Abstract

Separable scheduling unleashes the deployment flexibility of mobile emergency resources by dispatching carriers and functional modules separately yet in a coordinated manner, offering a promising avenue to enhance power system resilience. However, this flexibility induces a distinct carrier-supported module routing structure, where non-self-mobile modules must be routed through compatible carrier movements. The resulting carrier-module spatio-temporal coupling makes exact and tractable optimization challenging. This letter identifies this structure and develops a novel exact bi-layer time-space network formulation as a mixed-integer linear program. The proposed formulation represents carrier and module trajectories as interacting network flows and enforces their support relations through explicit arc-level coupling. Compared with the prior logic-based model, the proposed formulation preserves exactness while improving modeling flexibility by eliminating mandatory post-arrival dwelling. Numerical studies validate its correctness and demonstrate substantial computational advantages.