A Multilevel Crews Patrolling Framework for Distribution System Recovering

Diverse socio-economic impacts derive from power outages in distribution networks caused by faults. Estimating fault location comprises crews’ dispatch for patrolling the power lines in the outage area. Previous studies do not consider road network damage on patrolling procedures. Not taking into account the interdependency between the power distribution system and road network may underestimate the importance of the consequences. Additionally, the lion’s share of the literature neglects the crews’ pre-positioning, usually starting from depots, which does not reflect the truth. Typically, crews perform infield operations when an outage occurs. This work proposes a bilevel optimization for patrolling procedures and suggests prepositioning regions for in-field crews based on community detection. In addition, Monte Carlo simulations followed by statistical models verify the pre-positioning and the bilevel optimization improvements on reliability indices.