Probabilistic Quantification of Distribution System Resilience for an Extreme Event

The occurrence of natural disasters such as cyclones, earthquakes, and floods has increased worldwide, and their effect is most intense in localized regions. These events expose weaknesses in the power system infrastructures and show how well-prepared the system is to operate its services in a resilient way. During and after an extreme event, the outage and service disruption happens due to the inability of the affected part of the grid to cope with disruptions, which leads to insufficient resilience of the system. It is becoming more critical to enhance the resilience of electrical networks to extreme weather occurrences through suitable hardening processes and smart operational techniques. A reliable prevention approach necessitates a quantitative resilience metric that can estimate the effects of the future extreme events on distribution systems and assess the possible benefits of various planning strategies. This study aims to address the issue of lack of resilience metrics and proposes probabilistic metrics for evaluating the performance of distribution systems resilience in case of extreme weather events. Specifically, this study introduces active and passive resilience concepts to provide insights into system response. The proposed resilience metrics for various weather scenarios are quantified for the IEEE 33-bus system. The simulation framework also analyzes the effects of different operational and structural resilience improvement approaches on the proposed resilience metrics.