Resiliency enhancement with vulnerability mitigation and redundancy improvement of distribution network against severe hurricane

Vulnerability mitigation and redundancy improvement are of the solutions for creating resilient distribution networks that aim to prevent the uncontrollable outage propagation. In this paper, a comparative study is proposed for optimal feeder routing problem and HV substation placement considering cost and resilience. In the first case, the network is planned based on cost minimization, and then the proposed resilience index is calculated for the planned network. While in the second case, the network is designed based on resilience enhancement, and afterward, the planned network cost is calculated. In the case of resilient-based planning, the studied area is divided into small sites with different wind speed to evaluate the geospatial characteristics of a hurricane. A fragility index is calculated for each distribution network component located at each site. Furthermore, in this paper, the effect of HV substation number as redundancy improvement is considered in cost and resilient based planning performance. Results show that with increasing of the HV substation number, the cost of feeder routing is less increased. While it has more effect on the improvement of the resilient performance index. The obtained results validate the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed method.