  Extreme weather events have a significant impact on the aging and outdated
power distribution infrastructures. These high-impact low-probability (HILP)
events often result in extended outages and loss of critical services, thus,
severely affecting customers' safety. This calls for the need to ensure
resilience in distribution networks by quickly restoring the critical services
during a disaster. This paper presents an advanced feeder restoration method to
restore critical loads using distributed energy resources (DERs). A resilient
restoration approach is proposed that jointly maximizes the amount of restored
critical loads and optimizes the restoration times by optimally allocating
grid's available DER resources. The restoration problem is modeled as a
mixed-integer linear program with the objective of maximizing the resilience to
post-restoration failures while simultaneously satisfying grid's critical
connectivity and operational constraints and ensuring a radial operation for a
given open-loop feeder configuration. Simulations are performed to demonstrate
the effectiveness of the proposed approach using IEEE 123-node feeder with 5
DERs supplying 11 critical loads and IEEE 906-bus feeder with 3 DERs supplying
17 critical loads. The impacts of DER availability and fuel reserve on restored
networks are assessed and it is shown that the proposed approach is
successfully able to restore a maximum number of critical loads using available
DERs.
