Identification of the Radial Configurations Extracted From the Weakly Meshed Structures of Electrical Distribution Systems

The electrical distribution systems are typically structured as weakly meshed networks with multiple supply points, but they are operated with radial configurations by opening the redundant branches. The nonregular composition of the meshed structure and the constraints imposed by the number and location of the supply points complicate the problem of determining all of the possible radial configurations that can be extracted out of a given structure. This paper illustrates a novel procedure, based on the creation of a reduced network structure, to determine the number of possible radial configurations and the set of open branches corresponding to each radial configuration. The proposed approach is presented and applied to five test distribution systems commonly available in the literature, providing for the first time the information about the number and the layout of the possible radial configurations obtainable for these systems.