  Distributed generation and remotely controlled switches have emerged as
important technologies to improve the resiliency of distribution grids against
extreme weather-related disturbances. Therefore it becomes impor- tant to study
how best to place them on the grid in order to meet a resiliency criteria,
while minimizing costs and capturing their dependencies on the associated
communication systems that sustains their distributed operations. This paper
introduces the Optimal Resilient Design Problem for Distribution and Communi-
cation Systems (ORDPDC) to address this need. The ORDPDC is formulated as a
two-stage stochastic mixed-integer program that captures the physical laws of
distribution systems, the communication connec- tivity of the smart grid
components, and a set of scenarios which specifies which components are
affected by potential disasters. The paper proposes an exact branch-and-price
algorithm for the ORDPDC which features a strong lower bound and a variety of
acceleration schemes to address degeneracy. The ORDPDC model and
branch-and-price algorithm were evaluated on a variety of test cases with
varying disaster inten- sities and network topologies. The results demonstrate
the significant impact of the network topologies on the expansion plans and
costs, as well as the computational benefits of the proposed approach.
