  In the electrical grid, the distribution system is themost vulnerable to
severe weather events. Well-placed and coordinatedupgrades, such as the
combination of microgrids, systemhardening and additional line redundancy, can
greatly reduce thenumber of electrical outages during extreme events. Indeed,
ithas been suggested that resilience is one of the primary benefitsof networked
microgrids. We formulate a resilient distributiongrid design problem as a
two-stage stochastic program andmake use of decomposition-based heuristic
algorithms to scaleto problems of practical size. We demonstrate the
feasibilityof a resilient distribution design tool on a model of an
actualdistribution network. We vary the study parameters, i.e., thecapital cost
of microgrid generation relative to system hardeningand target system
resilience metrics, and find regions in thisparametric space corresponding to
different distribution systemarchitectures, such as individual microgrids,
hardened networks,and a transition region that suggests the benefits of
microgridsnetworked via hardened circuit segments.
