Intelligent stochastic framework to solve the reconfiguration problem from the reliability view

This study proposes a new method to employ the distribution feeder reconfiguration as a reinforcement strategy to enhance the reliability of the distribution systems. Also, several wind power sources are considered to assess their effects on the reliability indices. In order to make the final results more dependable, a stochastic framework based on the probabilistic power flow is utilised to consider the uncertainty of forecast/measurement error of the active and reactive loads, failure rate, repair rate and output generation of wind units, concurrently. The objective functions to be investigated are (i) system average interruption frequency index, (ii) average energy not supplied, (iii) active power losses and (iv) total cost. Moreover, a new modified optimisation method based on harmony search algorithm is proposed to improve the total ability of the algorithm to explore the problem search space globally. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method are examined through two radial distribution test systems.