Extreme events such as natural disasters, extreme weather and man-made attacks have the potential to disrupt the operation of power grid and in turn impact the society at large. Owing to the recent increase of these events which lead to sustained power outages, power system planners and policy makers are continuously interested in developing new and efficient post restoration schemes to improve grid resiliency. With the increased emergence of distributed energy resources (DERs) such as Solar PV plants and consumer owned diesel generators especially in the state of Kansas and worldwide at present, restoration can be acquired using these resources by forming possible microgrids and supplying critical loads.
However, the existence of different types of customers with varying social equity factors in a power distribution system urges the system operators to consider equitable load restoration. In current restoration schemes, these equity variations are less valued, resulting the people in rural areas or financially marginalized communities to have longer outage durations and limited access to resources. Taking this factor into account, this work proposes a method for power system restoration considering both social equity and consumer priority. The method is tested using actual data in a rural city in Kansas which is publicly available, and the results show both the significances of priority and equity-based power distribution system restoration. Further, the developed restoration algorithm provides valuable insights to system operators for faster restoration to communities with varying vulnerabilities which is frequent in states like Kansas.