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For maximizing the customer satisfaction and retention, improvement of service reliability is a major concern for electric utilities. Service reliability can be improved by placing switches and reclosers at appropriate locations in the distribution system so that supply from the main substation to the healthy load points can be maintained after isolating the faulted section. This paper presents a formulation for an optimal placement of switches and reclosers in a distribution system for maximizing system reliability while minimizing the associated investment and outage costs considering uncertainties in load data, system failure and repair rates. The uncertainties have been incorporated in the formulation using point estimate method (PEM). The proposed formulation has been tested on 13, 58 and IEEE 123-bus test systems using differential evolution (DE) and mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) method. The obtained results establish the effectiveness of the consideration of data uncertainties in improving the distribution system reliability and maximizing utilities’ profits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper presents a multiobjective optimization methodology to optimally place switches and protective devices in electric power distribution networks. Identifying the type and location of them is a combinatorial optimization problem described by a nonlinear and nondifferential function. The multiobjective ant colony optimization (MACO) has been applied to this problem to minimize the total cost while simultaneously minimize two distribution network reliability indices including system average interruption frequency index (SAIFI) and system interruption duration index (SAIDI). Actual distribution feeders are used in the tests, and test results have shown that the algorithm can determine the set of optimal nondominated solutions. It allows the utility to obtain the optimal type and location of devices to achieve the best system reliability with the lowest cost. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]