Resilience-Based Sequential Recovery Planning for Substations Subjected to Earthquakes

Electrical substations are crucial components in a power system while substation equipment can be easily damaged in an earthquake. Repairing the damaged equipment as soon as possible is essential to restore the functionality of the substation system and further secure the sustainable power supply of the power grid after the earthquake. However, the damaged equipment cannot be repaired simultaneously due to the limitation of emergency repair resources, and the recovery rate of the substation functionality will vary dramatically depending on the selection of different equipment repair sequences. Therefore, a sensible equipment repair sequence is needed to improve the recovery efficiency of the substation functionality. A resilience-based method was thus proposed in this paper to optimize the equipment repair sequence with the objective of minimizing the resilience index of the substation, which was defined as the post-earthquake overall functionality loss. The heuristic algorithm was incorporated into the systemic resilience assessment framework to find the optimal equipment repair sequence according to different initial damage states of equipment and the limitation of emergency repair resources. A case study was performed on a real-world substation system to illustrate and verify the proposed method, the analysis results can aid decision-makers in the post-earthquake recovery planning.