Review of Service Restoration Methods in Distribution Networks

Service restoration (SR) is one of the most important strategies to improve the resilience of the modern distribution network. After the fault location is identified and isolated, a proper SR plan should be determined to resupply out-of-service areas. This paper reviews the existing methods for SR in distribution networks, which can be categorized into two types, namely centralized methods and decentralized methods, according to their implementation. These methods utilize one or more techniques to derive the SR plan. The used techniques consist of expert systems, heuristic algorithms, meta-heuristic algorithms, graph theory, multi-agent systems and mathematical programming.