Reconfiguring Distribution Networks by Means of Minimizing Power Loss and Considering Overcurrent Protection

This paper studies the reciprocal impact of distribution network protection and reconfiguration of active Nowadays, with increasing energy consumption in distribution networks and the demand of consumers to buy highly reliable power, it is of high importance to establish adapt between protection and operation of the power system. distribution system. Accordingly, a distribution network reconfiguration is carried out to find the optimal switching operations in an economic way. Since the switching operations will change network topology as well as short circuit level of buses, the protection coordination may be invalid. To address this issue, constraints of the coordination of protection relays and fuses is being formulated and added to the reconfiguration problem. Moreover, the nonlinear equations of the problem are linearized and are transformed the reconfiguration problem into Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) one to achieve the global optimal solution. The proposed method has been implemented on 33 bus distribution network. The results clearly show effectiveness of the active and reactive power management in an intelligent distribution network considering protection concepts.