A robust approach to restoring critical loads in a resilient power distribution system

Owing to the increased number of natural disasters, ensuring a resilient operation of power distribution system is of paramount importance. In this paper, an advanced feeder restoration approach is proposed to improve the resilience of power distribution systems to natural disasters. In the proposed approach, distributed energy resources (DERs) are used to restore the critical loads when the distribution system is isolated from the main grid. The proposed restoration framework aims at maximizing the availability of restored networks making restoration plan robust to post-restoration failures. A resilience metric quantifying restoration availability is defined. A graph-theoretic approach is presented to formulate the restoration problem as a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) while satisfying grid's connectivity and operational constraints. The framework is tested using IEEE 123-node feeder with 5 DERs supplying for 9 critical loads. The simulation results validate the effectiveness of our proposed strategy in maximizing restoration availability.