Constructing power system restoration strategies

System restoration is an integral part of the overall defense system against catastrophic outages. The nature of system restoration problem involves status assessment, optimization of generation capability and load pickup. The optimization problem needs to take into numerous practical considerations and, therefore, it cannot be formulated as one single optimization problem. The other critical consideration for the development of decision support tools is its generality, i.e., the tools should be portable from a system to another with minimal customization. This presentation will provide a comprehensive methodology for construction of system restoration strategies. The strategy adopted by each power system differs, depending on the system characteristics and policies. A new method based on the concept of ¿generic restoration milestones¿ and ¿generic restoration actions¿ has been developed. A specific restoration strategy can be synthesized by a combination of the milestones and actions based on the actual system conditions. The decision support tool is expected to reduce the restoration time, thereby improving the system reliability.