Significant advances have been made in restoration of supplies by smart methods over recent years, in particular very short term restoration which is considered to be an increase in resilience.  Conversely smart techniques have contributed less to increases in true resilience; situations when customers never experience an outage of any length in the first place.

In the near future however improvements and cost reductions in battery technology, the prevalence of distributed generation particularly at lower voltages, and improvements in measurement and communications will offer smart opportunities to improve resilience. This would seem to be a potential low-cost route to improved true resilience but which mix of technology options, operational approaches would suit particular circumstances and locations is not known and the residual risk and actual deliverable benefit  is not understood.