Electric power systems constitute the fundamental infrastructure of modern society. Though continental in scale, they have virtually penetrated across places. Thus, access to electricity is a challenge during the blackout situation. Though failures are rare events, when they occur cause an catastrophic effect on the society on the whole. The services have to be restored as quickly as possible in order to minimize its consequences. Therefore, it is essential to be aware of the concepts and issues in the entire restoration process along with the mechanisms that need to be developed for quicker dissemination of information. This paper thus explores the need and the challenges encountered for restoration especially in the transmission sector. The paper further elaborates the use of artificial neural network (ANN) for determining the affected nodes and the restoration plan to be executed. This is followed by the providing the quantitative evaluation of the system developed.