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With the integration of high shares of distributed generators (DGs), both volatile DGs and demand-side resources make it increasingly difficult to cope with the various uncertainties and put forward a higher requirement for the operational flexibility in active distribution networks (ADNs). The highly integrated distribution-level power electronic devices represented by soft open point (SOP) significantly benefit the operation of ADNs. Due to the accurate and rapid power flow control provided by SOP, various flexible resources can be coordinated in the spatial and temporal aspects, which effectively increases the DG penetration of ADNs. In this paper, the multi-dimensional characteristics of distribution system flexibility are analysed and the maximum DG hosting capacity is adopted as the index to evaluate the flexibility brought by SOP. The flexibility evaluation model is further proposed to quantify the benefits of SOP-based flexible resources, such as conventional SOP, multi-terminal SOP and SOP with energy storage. Then, the original non-convex nonlinear model is converted into an effectively solved second-order cone programming (SOCP) model using convex relaxation. To tighten the deviation of convex relaxation to the predefined accuracy, a difference-of-convex programming (DCP)-based approach is developed to solve the proposed model. Finally, case studies are performed on the modified IEEE 33-node system to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]