A two-stage approach to enhance distribution network resilience against natural disasters

The natural disasters such as floods and storms have always led to widespread damages and serious disruptions in power distribution networks. After presenting a new index to quantitatively calculate the resilience of the power distribution network, this paper proposes a two-stage approach to enhance distribution network resilience against natural disasters in the presence of distributed generation (DG) units including solar cells and conventional gas-fired power sources. The first stage includes determining the boundaries of isolated zones and the optimal capacity of the DG units in each zone to improve the resilience by considering budget constraints. The second stage includes determining the optimal location of DG units in each zone to optimize the distribution network losses. A genetic algorithm (GA) based optimization method is developed to solve the proposed problem. The performance of the proposed approach is assessed and illustrated by numerical studies on a practical power distribution system from Iran