Hierarchical service restoration scheme for active distribution networks based on ADMM

Effective self-healing schemes enhance the resilience of active distribution networks (ADNs). As a critical part of self-healing, service restoration aims to restore outage areas with minimal un-supplied demands. With the increasing complexity and size of ADNs, distribution system operators (DSOs) face a more complicated service restoration problem. Thus, it is important to obtain optimal service restoration plans and reduce computational complexity. To achieve this goal, a hierarchical service restoration scheme is proposed to obtain service restoration plans based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). The optimal service restoration problem is formulated as a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model considering the switching sequence, distributed generation (DG) units and controllable loads, and is solved using the ADMM-based algorithm in a hierarchical manner. In the proposed scheme, each zone of the ADN has a local service restoration controller solving its sub-problem with information from a central service restoration controller. The central controller solves a global coordination problem with information from all the zones. Three case studies were conducted with the 44-node test system, modified IEEE 123-node system and Brazil 948-node system. The results show that the proposed hierarchical service restoration can obtain optimal service restoration plans and reduce computational complexity. Moreover, computation time can be reduced substantially by using the proposed hierarchical scheme for large-scale ADNs.