Switch placement algorithm for reducing customers outage impacts on radial distribution networks

Electricity has become a highly valuable resource for human beings. Its shortage is handled the same way as water, food and other essential environmental resources by governments. Outages of electricity are not acceptable by customers and are fully controlled by regulatory agencies through power system reliability indexes. The violation of such indexes normally imply in penalties to power utility companies. The application of methods and techniques to improve the power systems reliability, efficiency and customer satisfaction are desirable and constantly pursued by electric power utilities. The suitable placement of sectionalizer switches along radial distribution feeders to reduce the impact of outages is a useful approach to improve the system reliability performance. Heuristic methods are suitable and successfully employed for this task. This paper proposes a switch placement optimization algorithm aimed to reduce the number of affected customers by power outages. The algorithm is based on Particle Swarm Optimization method and its feasibility is demonstrated by applying it on a typical 3-bus distribution system. Failure rates are commonly applied in switch placement issues. A new objective function based on the number of customers not supplied is proposed to substitute the failure rates which are not always given to know by the utility companies.