Power System Resilience: Current Practices, Challenges, and Future Directions

TLDR

Extreme events and attacks are increasingly frequent, causing severe outages and equipment damage in power systems, yet resilience definitions and metrics remain unstandardized. The study aims to review and critique current resilience metrics and evaluation methods, proposing future directions toward universally accepted definitions and strategies to enhance grid resilience. The authors conduct a comprehensive review of existing resilience metrics, evaluation methods, and enhancement practices, assessing consensus across organizations and scholars to guide future standardization. The review identifies research gaps, challenges, and proposes potential solutions to address limitations in current resilience metrics and methods.

Abstract

The frequency of extreme events (e.g., hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods) and man-made attacks (cyber and physical attacks) has increased dramatically in recent years. These events have severely impacted power systems ranging from long outage times to major equipment (e.g., substations, transmission lines, and power plants) destructions. This calls for developing control and operation methods and planning strategies to improve grid resilience against such events. The first step toward this goal is to develop resilience metrics and evaluation methods to compare planning and operation alternatives and to provide techno-economic justifications for resilience enhancement. Although several power system resilience definitions, metrics, and evaluation methods have been proposed in the literature, they have not been universally accepted or standardized. This paper provides a comprehensive and critical review of current practices of power system resilience metrics and evaluation methods and discusses future directions and recommendations to contribute to the development of universally accepted and standardized definitions, metrics, evaluation methods, and enhancement strategies. This paper thoroughly examines the consensus on the power system resilience concept provided by different organizations and scholars and existing and currently practiced resilience enhancement methods. Research gaps, associated challenges, and potential solutions to existing limitations are also provided.