A Review of Community-Centric Power System Resilience: Strategies, Data-Driven Methods, and Techno-Legal Perspectives

This paper presents a comprehensive review of community-centric power system resilience, emphasizing the integration of community-level resilience considerations and techno-legal governance frameworks with engineering-based resilience enhancement strategies and data-driven approaches to address extreme events. Recent large-scale outages have demonstrated that power disruptions can cascade beyond electrical infrastructure and disproportionately affect vulnerable communities, critical services, and interconnected urban systems, highlighting the need for resilience approaches that integrate technical, social, and regulatory dimensions. Within this community-centric perspective, the review first summarizes state-of-the-art strategies for enhancing power system resilience, including network hardening, resource allocation, optimal scheduling, and system reconfiguration techniques, while highlighting the growing role of artificial intelligence (AI) and data-driven analytics in supporting resilience planning and operational decision-making. It then examines the interdependencies between power system resilience and community resilience, addressing socioeconomic and behavioral dimensions, cross-infrastructure interconnections, and the emerging role of resilience hubs. The paper further examines the techno-legal frameworks governing resilient energy systems by comparing the regulatory landscapes of the European Union (EU) and the United States, highlighting key similarities and distinctions that shape resilience planning and implementation. By analyzing state-of-the-art engineering-based, AI-driven, and techno-legal methods for assessing and mitigating the impacts of high-impact, low-probability (HILP) events, the review identifies critical research gaps and outlines promising directions for future investigation.