Communication-Aware Restoration of Smart Distribution Grids Based on Optimal Allocation of Resilience Resources

Abstract

Although power grids have become safer with increased situational awareness, major extreme events still pose reliability and resilience challenges, primarily at the distribution level, due to increased vulnerabilities and limited recovery resources. Information and communication technologies (ICIs) have introduced new vulnerabilities that have been widely investigated in previous studies. These vulnerabilities include remote device failures, communication channel disturbances, and cyber-attacks. However, only few studies have explored the opportunity offered by communications to improve the resilience of pow-er grids and eliminate the notion that power-telecom interdepen-dencies always pose a threat. This paper proposes a communication-aware restoration approach of smart distribution grids, which leverages power-telecom interdependencies to determine the optimal restoration strategies. The states of grid-energized telecom points are tracked to provide the best restoration actions, which are enabled through the resilience resources of re-pair, manual switching, remote reconfiguration, and distributed generators. As the telecom network coordinates the allocation of these resilience resources based on their coupling tendencies, different telecom architectures have been introduced to investigate the contribution of private and public ICTs to grid management and restoration operations. System restoration uses the configuration that follows a remote fast response as the input to formulate the problem as mixed-integer linear programming. Results from numerical simulations reveal an enhanced restoration process derived from telecom-aware recovery and the co-optimization of resilience resources. The existing disparity between overhead and underground power line configurations is also quantified.