Resilience Assessment of Distribution Systems with Different Voltage Levels

Resilience is a concept usually related to extreme events of High Impact and Low Probability (HILP). In the context of Service Restoration (SR) in Distribution Systems (DSs), it refers to the ability of the system to adapt, recover, and quickly restore consumer energy after permanent faults. Attempts to improve the resilience of DSs has been a concern in several studies. A resilience index is a measure that helps evaluate a DS’s performance in terms of its ability to deal with such events. This paper proposes an analysis of resilience through an index implemented in a Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm (MOEA) that addresses the SR problem in DSs considering the different voltage levels of the systems. The strategy enables better coordination and reliability for resolving the SR problem and resilience assessment. Simulations were performed in a DS from the literature considering two voltage levels, presence of distributed generation, and manually and remotely controlled switches, highlighting the importance of a resilience indicator and the multiple voltage levels approach for the planning and decision-making of utilities.