Look-ahead distribution power restoration analysis based on integrated operation of distribution automation and advanced metring infrastructure systems

Power restoration schemes incorporated into Distribution Automation (DA) system helps in quickly restoring the power during emergency situations like faults. Due to the numerous advancements made in the distribution system operation in recent times, power restoration analysis needs to be done in a look-ahead manner based on system wide operational & monitored data apart from just fault data processing during the outages. With the evolution of Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) during recent times, it is now possible to design the lookahead restoration schemes by integrating the operation of DA with AMI system using internet protocol based communications, preferably. In this paper, we propose a novel method for power restoration analysis which execute all pre-defined restoration schemes in a look-ahead manner by representing distribution system as a weighted graph and computing graph weights based on representation of DA & AMI system's current operational/ measured/constraint data from each distribution load segment. Computed graph weights are converted to restoration indices with associated ranking based mechanism to indicate criticality & considerations for each power restoration scheme in case of fault occurrence in real-time. A case study on the standard RBTS test system has been demonstrated for the proposed method.