Dynamic Restoration of Large-Scale Distribution Network Contingencies: Crew Dispatch Assessment

The restoration of large-scale distribution outages is a very demanding task that involves considerable risk of human error. To help in this task, decision support systems have been developed based on network optimization. The optimization problem consists in proposing a set of switching operations together with an order to perform them. In this paper, we focus on the role of crew dispatch assessment in switching order optimality. We formulate the optimal operations sequencing problem as a dynamic programming problem and show how to include crew dispatch assessment to minimize energy not supplied. The proposed approach is compared with an approach for which crew dispatch assessment is neglected. Results on the comparison are given for a realistic 120 MVA substation outage.