Reconfiguration of Shipboard Power System Microgrids after Fault Isolation, Using Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm

The reconfiguration of shipboard power systems after a fault is crucial for several reasons, including safety, reliability, operational continuity, and efficiency. This process helps prevent the spread of faults, ensures the maintenance of critical services on the ship, prevents incidents such as fires and explosions, and protects equipment. Additionally, fast system reconfiguration helps ensure continuity of operation and reduces maintenance costs. Therefore, such a reconfiguration is necessary to meet safety standards and reduce operating costs. In this paper, the restructuring of shipboard electric microgrids after the occurrence of a fault is investigated using the particle swarm optimization algorithm. The network under study is a zonal DC microgrid whose loads are divided into three critical, semi-critical, and non-critical categories. For each category of loads, penalty coefficients have been considered for not providing load energy. Due to the advantages of the particle swarm algorithm, such as simplicity of implementation, compatibility with different conditions, the possibility of applying various constraints, and the ability to respond to several simultaneous faults, this algorithm has been chosen to find the optimal arrangement of the shipboard electrical network. The performance of the system reconfiguration has also been investigated in four different scenarios. The results show that in all scenarios after the reconfiguration, the system returned to a stable state critical and semi-critical loads were provided as much as possible and the shedding of 1 MW of critical loads and 1 MW of semi-critical loads was prevented. These results confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method in improving the stability and reliability of the shipboard power system after the occurrence of a fault.