Optimal Positioning of Mobile Emergency Resources for Resilient Restoration

The extreme weather events have a significant impact on the aging and outdated power distribution infrastructures resulting in extended outages, the loss of critical services, and affecting customers' safety. This calls for ensuring a resilient operation by quickly restoring the critical services during natural disasters. Truck-mounted mobile emergency resources (MERs) are critical assets for fast electric service restoration across a distribution network, especially when customers do not have access to the main grid. This paper proposes a novel method for positioning and dispatching MERs to restore critical loads by dynamically forming restored networks or microgrids. A graphtheoretic approach is proposed to optimally locate MERs that maximally restores critical loads while simultaneously making the grid robust to post-restoration failures. The problem is modeled as a mixed-integer linear program that satisfies feeder's connectivity and operational constraints and assumes a radial operation in an open-loop distribution feeder with multiple tie-switches. Numerical simulations are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach with the help of a multi-feeder test case with 7 tie-switches and 160 sectionalizing switches supplying 9 critical loads (CLs) using 4 MERs.