Robust post-disaster repair crew dispatch for distribution systems considering the uncertainty of switches

After natural disasters’ strike, the remote-controlled switch plays a key role in network reconfiguration to restore the critical load. However, the status of these switches is hardly acquired in case of cyber malfunctions. This paper proposes a robust repair crew dispatch approach for distribution systems considering the uncertainty of remote-controlled switches. The proposed approach is formulated as a tri-level robust optimization model to obtain the repair crew dispatch strategy applicable to possible fault scenarios. The system operator determines the repair crew dispatch scheme at the first level. At the second level, the real-time status of switches under different combinations of faults and repair processes is modeled and the worst fault scenario is calculated. Based on the real-time status of switches, the operator utilizes distributed generators and network reconfiguration to restore loads. A nested column-and–constraint generation (NC&CG) algorithm is customized for the proposed robust model to achieve the optimal solution. Simulation results on the IEEE-33 node distribution test system and the IEEE 123-node system show the proposed approach can effectively reduce the maximum system loss and the NC&CG algorithm can significantly reduce the computing time.