Recursive restoration refinement: A fast heuristic for near-optimal restoration prioritization in power systems

The prioritization of restoration actions after large power system outages plays a key role in how quickly can be restored. It has been shown that fast and intuitive heuristics for most often result low-quality plans. Meanwhile, mathematical optimization tools find high-quality plans are too slow to applied planning problems practical interest. This work makes significant step closing this quality vs compute time gap by proposing the Recursive Restoration Refinement heuristic restoration. is produce near-optimal up 1000 times faster than other state-of-the-art solution methods on range test cases with 500 buses 700 damaged components. potential impact new demonstrated preliminary analysis features recursive refinement algorithm explored have made available as part open-source software package, PowerModelsRestoration, support ongoing research algorithms.