After disasters, restoring power to critical facilities like hospitals is an urgent priority. However, disasters often severely damage both power and communication infrastructure, making restoration efforts particularly challenging when communication resources are limited. Therefore, how to optimize the communication network of a microgrid to achieve high-efficiency, and resilience is a problem worth investigating.
To address the problem, we have applied edge centrality metrics to identify critical links as well as nonessential links. We have shown that Connectivity Rank Index (CRI) is an effective centrality metric to measure the importance of communication links for distributed structure. Based on this, we also proposed a CRI-based network optimization strategy by pruning. In addition, we defined a variant of CRI, called Local-CRI, to estimate the impact of link failures on hierarchical distributed structure.
In our future work, we will explore the integration of edge centrality metrics from complex network filed and physical constraints from power system. The strategic application of edge centrality metrics can be a practical and quantitative tool for us to design more efficient and resilient communication networks for microgrids in disaster relief.
