A new look on the automation of medium voltage substations in power distribution systems

With the expansion of electricity networks, increasing operational complexities, improved knowledge of the system operators, all with the subsidies elimination in some countries such as Iran and experiencing the real price of electricity by then, it necessitates a more reliable power to be delivered to the system customers. Power system automation is regarded as an efficient solution and the effective key to this problem. However, the great number of substations in power distribution systems has led to the fact that it is neither feasible nor economic to automate all of them. This calls for a comprehensive scheme on the placement of the distribution substations to be automated. In this paper, a practical glance is followed on the calculation of outage times which follows a practical approach for the substations placement. Some reliability-oriented indices are also proposed with which, together with their suitable fuzzy membership functions, the optimal location of substations for automation would be identified. The presented approach is finally applied to a real part of a distribution system in Tehran, Iran. And the results, as expected, show the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.