Reliability worth assessment of an Automatic Loop Restoration Scheme for urban distribution networks

Distribution automation (DA) application for fault management in the electricity distribution networks is one of the main potential remedial actions to reduce customers´ outage times and hence improve service reliability. As a result, various automation schemes have been developed and introduced in different countries and by different venders. The impacts of implementing a specific automation scheme on reliability indices of a given distribution system can be different from other available automation schemes. For this reason, when comparing the available automation schemes with each other or with the other reliability improvement measures, it is necessary to perform a course of reliability worth assessment activities in the related decision making process. This paper aims to quantitatively assess the reliability worth of employing an Automatic Loop Restoration Scheme (ALRS) for urban distribution networks. Distributed intelligence and peer-to-peer communication are the main features of this feeder automation scheme. An urban distribution reliability test system is utilized in this paper to perform the reliability worth assessment analyses.