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Power distribution systems are subject to faults that may cause damage to the grid and electric service interruptions. The outage impact can be attenuated by a restoration procedure that reconfigures the grid until the faulted component can be repaired. Proposals for this procedure usually are either fully centralized or fully decentralized. In this paper, a hybrid approach (partially decentralized) for the restoration problem based on a multi-agent system (MAS) is proposed and evaluated. Results show that caution must be taken when specifying the level of decentralization achieved by agent based procedures devoted to system restoration, especially if power limited devices are utilized to achieve agent communication.INDEX TERMS Decentralized power restoration, Self-healing grids, Multi-agent systems.

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