  The problem of partitioning a power grid into a set of microgrids, or
islands, is of interest for both the design of future smart grids, and as a
last resort to restore power dispatchment in sections of a grid affected by an
extreme failure. In the literature this problem is usually solved by turning it
into a combinatorial optimization problem, often solved through generic
heruristic methods such as Genetic Algorithms or Tabu Search. In this paper, we
take a different route and obtain the grid partition by exploiting the
synchronization dynamics of a cyberlayer of Kuramoto oscillators, each
parameterized as a rough approximation of the dynamics of the grid's node it
corresponds to. We present first a centralised algorithm and then a
decentralised strategy. In the former, nodes are aggregated based on their
internode synchronization times while in the latter they exploit
synchronization of the oscillators in the cyber layer to selforganise into
islands. Our preliminary results show that the heuristic synchronization based
algorithms do converge towards partitions that are comparable to those obtained
via other more cumbersome and computationally expensive optimization-based
methods.
