Post-disaster distribution system restoration with unmanned aerial vehicle inspection for uncertain fault locations

Uncertainties in fault location greatly hinder the post-disaster restoration of distribution systems. This paper proposes an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) assisted distribution system restoration method after disasters to eliminate the uncertainties in fault locations. First, a tri-level defender-attacker-defender model is formulated to predict the maximum load loss, and a novel UAV deployment and dispatch model is proposed to determine the optimal deployment plan of UAVs and plan the inspection route. To ensure the connectivity of planned routes, the connectivity constraints are designed based on the fictitious flow method. After disasters, UAVs inspect the entire system according to the pre-planned route. When UAVs complete the inspection, the distribution network immediately utilizes network reconfiguration, repair crews, distributed generators, and energy storage systems to restore critical loads and repair faults. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed strategy is validated on the IEEE 69-node system and a real-world distribution system in southeastern China. Results indicate that the proposed method can quickly complete the entire system inspection under different traffic conditions and improve the restoration efficiency. Compared with the manual inspection, the proposed method can reduce the inspection time by approximately 30 % in a low traffic congestion level.∗