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

Summary: 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]