Resilience Enhancement of Cyber-Physical Distribution Systems by Coordinating Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Multi-Function Emergency Trucks

The post-disaster recovery of cyber-physical distribution systems (CPDS) critically depends on the coordinated restoration of the inter-dependent communication networks (CNs) and power distribution networks (PDNs). The deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as aerial base stations is a promising strategy for communication restoration, but it is severely hampered by their limited flight endurance. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a comprehensive resilience enhancement framework centered on the synergistic operation of UAVs and multi-function emergency trucks (MFETs). In this paradigm, MFETs not only provide emergency power to the grid but also serve as mobile docking stations for UAV transport, docking, and battery swapping. An extended time-space network model is formulated to characterize the spatio-temporal dynamics and interactions between UAVs and MFETs. In addition, an adaptive UAV working site generation algorithm is developed to optimize UAV placement and scheduling. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is validated using two test systems of different scales. Numerical results demonstrate that the coordinated UAV-MFET operation significantly enhances CPDS resilience. Moreover, the adaptive algorithm improves restoration quality while substantially reducing the computational burden.