Subsystem size optimization for efficient parallel restoration of power systems

It is essential to rapidly restore a power system after a blackout to minimize the economic losses and negative social impact. The most common approach of accelerating the restoration process is by restoring the complete network as several subsystems in parallel. Even though a parallel restoration process has obvious advantages over its sequential alternatives, sizes of the subsystems play key roles in controlling the overall restoration time. Existing network partitioning strategies for parallel restoration do not put control on the individual subsystem size. In this paper, we proposed a partitioning strategy that helps to accelerate the restoration process by minimizing the subsystem size differences. Case study results given in this paper illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed partitioning strategy in parallel restoration of the power systems.