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 damage and seriously disrupt at the power distribution network. This paper, after presenting a new index to quantitatively calculate the resilience of the distribution network, proposes a two-stage approach to enhance distribution network resilience against natural disasters in the presence of distributed generation (DG) including photovoltaic and conventional gas-fired power sources. The first stage includes determining the boundaries of isolated zones and optimal capacity of the DG units in each zone with the aim of improving the resilience by considering budget constraint. The second stage includes determining the optimal location of DG in each zone with the aim of optimizing 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 distribution system from Iran.