Military bases, communities, and university-scale microgrids are being implemented to serve critical loads of high priority. Remote switch scheduling and distributed energy resources (DERs) operation strategies for post-disaster service restoration have been explored in previous literature. Flexible buildings offer the central microgrid management system an opportunity to ensure available energy is directed to the critical loads. This work presents a novel bi-level optimal sequence of operations for managing the controllable devices in small-scale microgrids to serve loads based on a priority scheme in campus-scale microgrids. This study introduces a technique for step-by-step restoration of customers' granular loads. After and during an outage scenario, the facilities' internal loads are energized in sequence according to their customer and local criticality levels, as well as the amount of energy available from the bulk system and DERs. The proposed methodology is formulated as a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model and adapts to various operating conditions. The proposed method is validated by performing controller hardwarein-loop (CHIL) case studies on the Banshee microgrid benchmark model on a real-time simulator.

Industrial, commercial, and residential facilities are progressively adopting automation and generation capabilities. By having flexible demand and renewable energy generation, traditional passive customers are becoming active participants in electric power system operations. Through profound coordination among grid operators and active customers, the facilities' capability for demand response (DR) and distributed energy resource (DER) management will be valuable asset for ancillary services (ASs). To comply with the increasing demand and flexible energy, utilities urgently require standards, regulations, and programs to efficiently handle load-side resources without trading off stability and reliability. This study reviews different types of customers' flexibilities for DR, highlighting their capabilities and limitations in performing local ancillary services (LASs), which should benefit the power grid by profiting from it through incentive mechanisms. Different financial incentives and techniques employed around the world are presented and discussed. The potential barriers in technical and regulatory aspects are successfully identified and potential solutions along with future guidance are discussed.

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