  The ever increasing utilization of sensitive loads in the industrial,
commercial and residential areas in distribution networks requires enhanced
reliability and quality of supply. This can be achieved thanks to self healing
features of smart grids that already include the control technologies necessary
for the restoration strategy in case of a fault. In this paper, an analytical
and global optimization model is proposed for the restoration problem. A novel
mathematical formulation is presented for the reconfiguration problem reducing
the number of required binary variables while covering more practical scenarios
compared to the existing models. The considered self healing actions besides
the network reconfiguration are the nodal load rejection, the tap setting
modification of voltage regulation devices (incl. OLTCs, SVR, and CBs), and the
active or reactive power dispatch of DGs. The voltage dependency of loads is
also considered. Thus, the proposed optimization problem determines the most
efficient restoration plan minimizing the number of deenergized nodes with the
minimum number of self healing actions. The problem is formulated as a Mixed
Integer Second Order Cone Programming (MISOCP) and solved using the Gurobi
solver via the MATLAB interface YALMIP. A real 83 node distribution network is
used to test and verify the presented methodology.
