A Joint Communication-Load Restoration Strategy Based on UAVs For Resilient Distribution System

The restoration of the distribution system (DS) after a natural disaster is often challenged by the failure of the distribution automation (DA) function due to damage to communication facilities, resulting in a prolonged load extraction process. This paper proposes a joint communication-load restoration strategy based on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Specifically, a UAV-based emergency communication system is constructed, which considers communications links and interferences between UAVs and ground power devices such as feeder terminal units (FTUs). A probabilistic Line-of-Sight (LoS) and Non-Line-of-Sight (NLoS) link propagation model is used to describe the communication channel. Meanwhile, a microgrid reconfiguration and load restoration model for DS employing an efficient radial topology model is built. Given these, UAV deployment locations and DS reconfiguration plan are jointly optimized to maximize the load restoration. Such a joint optimization problem is a complex non-convex optimization problem. This paper divided the whole optimization problem into two sub-problems by an efficient iterative algorithm using block coordinate descent (BCD). The linear programming (LP) relaxation, successive convex approximation (SCA) and the binary expansion approach are adopted to solve these sub-problems. The results show that the joint restoration strategy can fully exploit the UAV communication recovery potential and enhance DS resilience.