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With the aging of electricity transmission and distribution infrastructures and increasing intensity of extreme weather events, the aggravated vulnerability of electric distribution systems to extreme weather events has motivated the study of resilient distribution systems. This study presents a review of the state‐of‐the‐art research on distribution grid resilience. First, the definition and quantifying metrics of resilience in the electrical distribution system are summarised. Second, the long‐term and short‐term measures to enhance the distribution system resilience are discussed. In particular, the recent studies on distributed generation and microgrid‐assisted resilience enhancements are reviewed. Finally, recommendations for future research are presented.

The United States (US) Expanded Access Program (EAP) to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) convalescent plasma was initiated in response to the rapid spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the causative agent of COVID-19. While randomized clinical trials were in various stages of development and enrollment, there was an urgent need for widespread access to potential therapeutic agents. The objective of this study is to report on the demographic, geographical, and chronological characteristics of patients in the EAP, and key safety metrics following transfusion of COVID-19 convalescent plasma. Mayo Clinic served as the central institutional review board for all participating facilities, and any US physician could participate as a local physician-principal investigator. Eligible patients were hospitalized, were aged 18 years or older, and had-or were at risk of progression to-severe or life-threatening COVID-19; eligible patients were enrolled through the EAP central website. Blood collection facilities rapidly implemented programs to collect convalescent plasma for hospitalized patients with COVID-19. Demographic and clinical characteristics of all enrolled patients in the EAP were summarized. Temporal patterns in access to COVID-19 convalescent plasma were investigated by comparing daily and weekly changes in EAP enrollment in response to changes in infection rate at the state level. Geographical analyses on access to convalescent plasma included assessing EAP enrollment in all national hospital referral regions, as well as assessing enrollment in metropolitan areas and less populated areas that did not have access to COVID-19 clinical trials. From April 3 to August 23, 2020, 105,717 hospitalized patients with severe or life-threatening COVID-19 were enrolled in the EAP. The majority of patients were 60 years of age or older (57.8%), were male (58.4%), and had overweight or obesity (83.8%). There was substantial inclusion of minorities and underserved populations: 46.4% of patients were of a race other than white, and 37.2% of patients were of Hispanic ethnicity. Chronologically and geographically, increases in the number of both enrollments and transfusions in the EAP closely followed confirmed infections across all 50 states. Nearly all national hospital referral regions enrolled and transfused patients in the EAP, including both in metropolitan and in less populated areas. The incidence of serious adverse events was objectively low (<1%), and the overall crude 30-day mortality rate was 25.2% (95% CI, 25.0% to 25.5%). This registry study was limited by the observational and pragmatic study design that did not include a control or comparator group; thus, the data should not be used to infer definitive treatment effects. These results suggest that the EAP provided widespread access to COVID-19 convalescent plasma in all 50 states, including for underserved racial and ethnic minority populations. The study design of the EAP may serve as a model for future efforts when broad access to a treatment is needed in response to an emerging infectious disease. ClinicalTrials.gov NCT#: NCT04338360.

Power outages cost billions of dollars every year and jeopardise the lives of hospital patients. Traditionally, power distribution system takes a long time to recover after a major blackout, due to its top‐down operation strategy. New technologies in modern distribution systems bring opportunities and challenges to distribution system restoration. As fast response energy resources, plug‐in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) can accelerate the load pickup by compensating the imbalance between available generation and distribution system load. This study provides a bottom‐up restoration strategy to use PHEVs for reliable load pickup and faster restoration process. The optimisation problem of finding load pickup sequence to maximise restored energy is formulated as a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) problem. Moreover, the coordination between transmission and distribution restoration is developed to efficiently restore the entire system back to normal operating conditions. Simulation results on one 100‐feeder test system demonstrate the efficiency of MILP‐based restoration strategy and the benefit from PHEVs to restore more energy in given restoration time. The proposed restoration strategy has great potential to facilitate system operators to achieve efficient system restoration plans. It also provides incentives to deploy a large amount of PHEVs to improve system resiliency.

Distribution system resilience is an emerging topic of interest given an increasing number of extreme events and adverse impacts on the power grid (e.g. Hurricane Maria and Ukraine cyber‐attack). The concept of resilience poses serious challenges to the power system research community given varied definitions and multivariate factors affecting resilience. The ability of nature or malicious actors to disrupt critical services is a real threat to the life of our citizens, national assets and the security of a nation. Many examples of such events have been documented over the years. Promising research in this area has been in progress focused on the quantification and in enabling resilience of the distribution system. The objective of this study is to provide a detailed overview of distribution system resilience, the classification, assessment, metrics for measuring resilience, possible methods for enabling resilience, and the associated challenges. A new multi‐dimensional and multi‐temporal resilience assessment framework is introduced along with a research roadmap outlining the future of resilience to help the reader conceptualise the theories and research gaps in the area of distribution system cyber‐physical resilience.

A power distribution network is a critical infrastructure in any society and any disruption has an enormous impact on the economy and daily lives. Therefore, the objective of this study is to transform the conventional power distribution systems into resilient autonomous microgrid networks by optimally sizing and siting the distributed generators (DGs). First, N main DGs are placed to transform an existing network into an autonomous microgrid network. Second, all the possible combinations of the initially deployed DGs are made and then the outage of 1 to N  − 1 DGs is considered. Considering the outage of DGs in each combination (one at a time), the resiliency of the network is analysed. Amount of load shedding, total power loss in the network, and voltage limits are analysed in this step. Finally, based on the resiliency analysis, additional DGs are placed to enhance the resiliency of the transformed network. Heuristic methods (particle swarm optimisation and genetic algorithm) are used for both sizing and siting of DGs during the first and the second steps. The objective of the formulation is to minimise load shedding, total power loss (active and reactive), and voltage deviations in the network during DG outages.