An innovative method for optimization of power system restoration path

Optimization of power system restoration path is a combinatorial optimization problem, which is one of the sub-problems of the whole power system restoration. Because the optimization of restoration path problem is a classical NP-hard problem and time consuming, furthermore the corresponding solution algorithm for optimal path will be performed frequently during the entire optimization process. It is very important to speed-up the computational runtime of optimization procedure. In existing research, heuristic algorithm has been widely used to solve this problem due to its strong optimization capability, and has achieved a good performance. But the efficiency of existing heuristic algorithm for large scale system should be further enhanced. Therefore, an efficient heuristic algorithm based on minimum cost maximum flow modelling has been proposed in this paper. The problem of optimizing power system restoration path is formulated as a minimum cost maximum flow problem. The system topology is constructed as a single-source and single-sink network, maximizing the network flow is used to ensure the connectivity of restoration path, then the best set of energizing transmission line can be found by minimizing the cost of flow from source s to sink t. The IEEE standard test systems are used to examine the applicability of proposed method. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method is more efficient than traditional method.