Distribution System Resilience Enhancement through Restoration Paths between DERs and Critical Loads

Hardening and operational measures in electrical distribution systems (EDSs) aim at improving the resilience of EDS in case of natural disasters. This paper proposes a novel two-stage framework for establishing optimal restoration paths for supplying critical loads (CLs) in the aftermath of a natural disaster that will improve the resilience of EDSs. To this end, in the first stage, an algorithm is introduced to find all possible candidate paths between available distributed energy resources (DERs) and CLs, the output of which is applied to the second stage, as the inputs. Subsequently, in the second stage, the problem of finding the optimal restoration paths is modeled as a mixed integer linear programming (MILP). In the proposed mathematical formulation, only the status of candidate paths is represented by binary variables, thereby reducing the complexity of the problem. The 33-bus distribution test system is used in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.