Do topological models contribute to decision making on post-disaster electric power system restoration?

This paper introduces two topological models and proposes several topology-based strategies to generate the restoration sequences of the damaged components in a post-disaster power system, and then compares their effectiveness with a random strategy (RS) and a power supply optimized strategy (PSOS, which considers the power flow for restoration optimization), where the strategy effectiveness is quantified by resilience loss defined as the area between real performance curve and target performance curve during the restoration period. Taking the IEEE 300 power system under node failures as an example, results show that under limited restoration resources, topology-based strategies can improve upon the RS-based resilience loss by 39%-46% at most, and their produced average minimum resilience loss is 1.14-1.46 times the PSOS-based resilience loss; when taking restoration sequences generated by topology-based strategies as an input of PSOS, better restoration sequences are found with the resilience loss improved by 16% at most. Similar results are also found under other system parameter settings, other failure types, and other power systems.