Decision support system for multicriteria reconfiguration of power distribution systems using CSO and efficient graph traversal and repository management techniques

摘要

Changing the topology of the electric distribution system through altering the open/closed status of the system switches is executed primarily for 2 reasons: (1) restoring supply to customers due to power outages, referred to as supply or load restoration, and (2) improving system operation through distribution system reconfiguration. In keeping with the latter reason, this study proposes a decision support system (DSS) for multicriteria distribution system reconfiguration, which provides choice modelling and contributes to making optimal decisions concerning minimization of losses, cost of switching, and load balancing index in the system. The DSS uses cat swarm optimization for its distinctive exploration and exploitation capacities as an evolutionary multicriterion optimizer to solve this non-linear programming problem. Moreover, it uses graph traversal techniques and heuristic fitness sharing mechanisms to find optimal configurations through a smart stochastic search. Using several key performance indicators, the efficiency of the proposed method is assessed on a 119-bus distribution system by conducting a quantitative performance appraisal, considering demand variations. By introducing a set of viable alternatives to the distribution network operator, simulation results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed DSS.