Quantifying impacts of automation on resilience of distribution systems

Automating the process of restoring service to customers after a large-scale outage event have significant impacts on the agility and speed of recovery in distribution systems. This study develops a set of probabilistic metrics to assess the impact of automation in enhancing the resilience of power distribution systems. The proposed metrics capture the features and detailed process of automatically locating and isolating faults and restoring the service to customers in distribution systems. In addition, this study develops a model to evaluate the spatio-temporal impacts of hurricane on power distribution systems, which is used to generate hurricane-induced outage scenarios to calculate the resilience metrics given different automation schemes. The proposed model is utilised to evaluate the resilience of bus number four of Roy Billinton Test System in the face of a passing hurricane. The metrics are calculated to evaluate the impact of different levels of automation throughout the network, the intensity of the hurricane, and line hardening on the resilience of the system.