  Power systems are susceptible to natural threats including hurricanes and
floods. Modern power grids are also increasingly threatened by cyber attacks.
Existing approaches that help improve power system security and resilience may
not be sufficient; this is evidenced by the continued challenge to supply
energy to all customers during severe events. This paper presents an approach
to address this challenge through bio-inspired power system network design to
improve system reliability and resilience against disturbances. Inspired by
naturally robust ecosystems, this paper considers the optimal ecological
robustness that recognizes a unique balance between pathway efficiency and
redundancy to ensure the survivability against disruptive events for given
networks. This paper presents an approach that maximizes ecological robustness
in transmission network design by formulating a mixed-integer nonlinear
programming optimization problem with power system constraints. The results
show the increase of the optimized power system's robustness and the improved
reliability with less violations under N-x contingencies.
