An Integrated Approach for Power System Restoration Planning

Power system outages/blackouts, especially weather related, are becoming more and more frequent, incurring significant economic and social costs. The ability to restore power services quickly after a blackout is crucial for power system resilience. Power system restoration is an extremely complicated process, involving multiple steps, highly combinatorial operational decisions, and highly nonlinear technical constraints, which make restoration planning an exceptionally challenging task. This paper will first introduce the restoration process and operations, examine important issues in restoration, and survey the state of the art in the research and practice of power system restoration planning. Then, we will focus on the commonly used buildup restoration planning strategy, in which the system is sectionalized into smaller subsystems with initial power sources, and then the subsystems are restored in parallel. Due to the complexity, existing approaches treat the sectionalization and restoration separately, leading to a suboptimal restoration plan. We will introduce an integrated restoration planning approach to improve the quality of restoration plans globally (such as shorter overall restoration time) by using mathematical programming and simulation in an interactive and iterative way. Case studies will be provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.