Critical Load Restoration in Urban Distribution System Considering Multiple Participants

Extreme events such as natural disasters can cause severe damage to the power system and lead to outages. After outages, various power sources, such as distributed generations (DGs) and microgrids, can be used to restore the critical loads in the urban distribution system (UDS). However, microgrids are usually operated by different owners and they have different preference on feeding their own loads or participating in the UDS restoration under the power outage scenario. In this paper, a critical load restoration method is proposed considering the preference of multiple participants. First, the concept of virtual flow decomposition for a microgrid participant is proposed to distinguish that the loads in it are restored by internal or external energy. Based on the virtual flow decomposition, a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) for critical load restoration is proposed to maximize the weighted load restoration time considering the preference of participants. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is validated on a modified IEEE 13-node test system.