Resilience of electrical distribution systems with critical load prioritization

Abstract

In the highly interdependent environment of a large city, failures in the electrical distribution system can cause direct or indirect consequences to other critical infrastructures and to the Human Well-being Level (HWL) of the citizens. This paper discusses the electrical distribution system in terms of how topological reconfiguration, together with prioritized system recovery can maintain a high level of Human Well-being resilience during system failures. The Infrastructure Interdependencies Simulator (i2SIM) is used to prioritize load restoration and load shedding algorithms. To validate the proposed approach, spanning tree search algorithms, load shedding schemes and optimization methods are applied to find optimal restoration strategies on a standard IEEE 30-node system and on a 70-node distribution system with critical loads.