Prioritizing Resilience Enhancement Measures for Electric Distribution Networks Against Hurricanes

In recent years, climate change and increasing occurrence rate of high-impact rare (HR) natural events such as hurricanes have made it difficult to supply uninterrupted power to end-user customers. The extensive geographic area of electric distribution networks, as the last ring of the energy supply chain in power systems, has increased the vulnerability of these networks against natural events. Thus, distribution companies are inevitably inclined to implement some measures to improve the resilience of the associated network. Considering budget limitations, adopting optimal measures among a set of candidate solutions is a major challenge for distribution networks. A new method is presented in this paper to prioritize the resilience enhancement measures for distribution networks. In this regard, a set of candidate measures is first defined so as to improve the resilience of the distribution network against an HR event. Then, the candidate measures are ranked by the benefit to cost ratio (BCR) index which is calculated by dividing the relative resilience improvement to relative implementation cost for each measure. The proposed method was examined on the IEEE 33-bus test distribution network using MATLAB software. Numerical results verified the efficacy of the proposed method.