A Mathematical Model for Restoration Problem in Smart Grids Incorporating Load Shedding Concept

The automatic restoration process is an important part of advanced distribution automation which seeks to automatically restore outage loads in smart grids. This ability of the smart grids improves the reliability and reduces the service interruption period. According to the importance of the restoration problem, this work focuses on modeling this problem in a simpler manner which is appropriate for smart grid. Since the smart grid agents can perform distributed computational activities and make decisions individually, the proposed model is constructed as a routing problem in a virtual graph which is developed based on the out-of-service areas in the main grid. This model is solved instead of the commonly used NP-hard restoration problem during decision making process to obtain the optimal restoration plan. The presented routing problem which is constrained by some power system operating constraints considers the load shedding concepts and gives the shedding program with respect to the load prioritizations. It can be solved by a linear binary programming technique such as branch and bound. Finally to demonstrate the designed restoration algorithm capabilities, a standard test system is selected and the method is implemented on it. The given results show the applicability of the proposed model.