Abstract
Over the last few decades, the globe has experienced disasters and man-made attacks on electrical power systems. These incidents made direct and indirect impacts on power system infrastructure, resulting in significant economic and other losses. The backbone and one of the most important components of human life is the resilient electric infrastructure. Thus, a resilient infrastructure must be modelled as close to the reality in order to assess high-impact and low-probability disasters to realize true-scale impacts. Ensuring the resilience in a distribution network has also been a challenge and must be addressed in electric power system planning and operation giving due insights. By considering technical and economic facts, this paper presents a critical assessment of recent research on applied strategies and frameworks for enhancing distribution network resilience and service restoration. Different load restoration techniques employing distributed energy resources including mobile emergency resources and renewable energy sources are also reviewed. Service restoration, techno-economic constraints, modelling assumptions, uncertainties, and metrics are also reviewed and analysed. The established probabilistic and deterministic frameworks, including methodologies, techniques, and strategies, are evaluated in order to exploit current and future needs of modern power distribution network.