Assessing Distribution Network Resilience Index with Impact Chains

In recent years, natural disasters and severe weather events have increased. The power grid is a critical infrastructure prone to severe extreme events whose generalized failures can dramatically affect people's safety and economy depending on recovery duration. For these reasons, identifying the most critical parts of the critical infrastructure is a challenging task pivotal to giving to the decision-makers, who must allocate funds to guarantee an acceptable level of risk, all the elements useful for the system resilience appraisal. This paper proposes an easy-to-use approach to evaluate the resilience of distribution networks by providing only high-level information. The method exploits the approach of the impact chains, which are used in many fields that are even different from power systems. This paper defines a possible adjustment of the approach of the impact chains to the power system, with particular attention to the climate model projections to consider the expected climate change. Then, this adaptation is formulated by considering a specific severe weather event, such as the heatwaves, and it is applied to a given portion of Italian territory served by a representative distribution network to demonstrate the validity of the approach.