A Fragility-Weighted Topological Network for Resilient Assessment of Overhead Power Distribution System Subjected to Hurricane Winds

Extreme weather events with an increased frequency have caused widespread damages to overhead power distribution systems (OPDS), an essential lifeline infrastructure, resulting in enormous societal and economic losses for communities. Cascading failure is a critical issue within OPDSs and starts with the failure of a system component, such as a pole, leading to large power outages. Therefore, the resilient assessment of OPDSs under extreme weather events could help evaluate system vulnerability and the performance of recovery strategies. Traditionally, the assessment is performed using an unweighted network based on topology, but this lacks the inclusion of OPDS structural properties. Therefore, a resilient assessment framework for OPDS subject to hurricane winds is proposed in this study with the integration of structural properties to consider the impact of system safety. Instead of the traditional unweighted network, a fragility-weighted topological network is formed to evaluate the performance of an OPDS against cascading failure. The system is found to be more vulnerable under an intentional failure scenario based on a comparison of performance under different attack scenarios. In addition, the impact of electricity load redistribution within the system can be obtained by performing dynamic analysis. Finally, different restoration strategies are included in the framework for comparison. Postdisruption restoration plans can be optimized in terms of recovery speed to benefit utility managers and decision makers from the improved resilience. (C) 2022 American Society of Civil Engineers.