A Review of Community-Centric Power System Resilience: Strategies, Data-Driven Methods, and Techno-Legal Perspectives

TL;DR

This comprehensive review explores community-centric power system resilience, integrating technical, social, and legal perspectives, emphasizing AI-driven strategies, interdependencies, and regulatory frameworks for addressing extreme events.

Contribution

It synthesizes current engineering, data-driven, and legal approaches to power system resilience, highlighting gaps and future research directions in community-focused energy resilience.

Findings

AI and data analytics support resilience planning and decision-making.

Community resilience is interconnected with power system strategies and policies.

Regulatory frameworks differ between the EU and US, influencing resilience implementation.

Abstract

This paper presents a comprehensive review of community-centric power system resilience, emphasizing the integration of community-level resilience considerations and techno-legal governance frameworks with engineering-based resilience enhancement strategies and data-driven approaches to address extreme events. Recent large-scale outages have demonstrated that power disruptions can cascade beyond electrical infrastructure and disproportionately affect vulnerable communities, critical services, and interconnected urban systems, highlighting the need for resilience approaches that integrate technical, social, and regulatory dimensions. Within this community-centric perspective, the review first summarizes state-of-the-art strategies for enhancing power system resilience, including network hardening, resource allocation, optimal scheduling, and system reconfiguration techniques, while highlighting the growing role of artificial intelligence (AI) and data-driven analytics in supporting resilience planning and operational decision-making. It then examines the interdependencies between power system resilience and community resilience, addressing socioeconomic and behavioral dimensions, cross-infrastructure interconnections, and the emerging role of resilience hubs. The paper further examines the techno-legal frameworks governing resilient energy systems by comparing the regulatory landscapes of the European Union (EU) and the United States, highlighting key similarities and distinctions that shape resilience planning and implementation. By analyzing state-of-the-art engineering-based, AI-driven, and techno-legal methods for assessing and mitigating the impacts of high-impact, low-probability (HILP) events, the review identifies critical research gaps and outlines promising directions for future investigation.