Optimal islands determination in power system restoration applying multi-objective populated simulated annealing

Despite power system operators' efforts, blackouts occur; therefore, power systems should be restored. To attain this, power system restoration is done applying different strategies after a complete blackout. The most famous one is the bottom-up strategy. Determining the islands is of extreme importance in this strategy. Hence, this paper proposes a new version of multi-objective populated simulated annealing considering the cohesiveness and the quality of islands as objective functions. The proposed method takes into account miscellaneous constraints such as black-start availability in each island, load-generation balance, power flow establishment equations, and the availability of synchronization devices. Simulation results for the IEEE 39 and 118-bus test systems confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method in determining the islands.