Human-Aware Power Restoration for Fair Outage Experience in Distribution Systems

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel methodology for human-aware and fair service restoration in power distribution networks, explicitly accounting for the customer experience of outage duration. The complexity of this problem stems from the inherently unpredictable and stochastic nature of power outage events. Traditional approaches often oversimplify the problem by treating failures as deterministic, overlooking the lived experiences of customers and the true uncertainty of outage patterns. In contrast, the proposed method incorporates the probability of potential failures to guide a customer-aware and fairness-driven resource allocation, ensuring that restoration is not only fast but also perceived as fair from the customer's perspective. To achieve this, a spatially distributed, adaptive, and scalable partitioning policy is designed to balance restoration time across all failure locations, promoting consistency and equity in the outage experience. Next, an adaptive and distributed repair crew dispatch algorithm is proposed to accelerate service restoration while ensuring that no customer segment is disproportionately affected. The framework leverages a Receding Horizon (RH) optimization algorithm to dynamically minimize total restoration time amid randomly occurring outages in both space and time. Simulation results on modified 69-bus distribution networks under stochastic outage conditions demonstrate the model's effectiveness in delivering socially fair and customer-sensitive restoration outcomes