1.School of Electrical & Information Engineering, Changsha University of Science and Technology, Changsha 410114, China;2.State Grid Henan Economic Research Institute, Zhengzhou 450052, China;3.School of Electrical & Information Engineering, Hunan University, Changsha 410082, China

The fault recovery of distribution network is one of the most important functions of distribution network automation, which aims to realize the fast and maximal recovery of non-faulty out-of-service areas. Therefore, a recovery method for distribution network fault based on topology directed traversal is proposed. The method uses the network topology to hierarchically divide the self-healing unit group of the specific network, and then determines the range of the non-faulty out-of-service areas and the power recovery method by the basic-loop matrix of the self-healing unit. For the case that can be restored through network reconstruction, the heuristic rules are firstly used to close the tie switch that meets the conditions to restore the power supply of the non-faulty out-of-service areas, and then the current-carrying situation of each layer of the branch is judged through the network layering. The status of all the tie switches and section switches that meet the conditions in the minimum self-healing unit should be exchanged. If the branch overload still exists, the load shedding operations on the non-faulty out-of-service areas will be performed. An 84-node system is used as an example to verify the effectiveness of the method. The results show that the method consumes less time and has fewer switching actions than the existing mainstream fault recovery algorithms.