Enhancing deregulated distribution network reliability for minimizing penalty cost based on reconfiguration using BPSO

This research’s focus is on the description and solution one of the distribution companies (DISCOs) optimization problem in deregulated distribution systems. In this paper it is assumed according to the contract, DISCOs must pay a penalty cost (PC) to its customers if any interruption happens in the service continuity. Determination of minimum PC configuration based on reconfiguration using binary particle swarm optimization (BPSO) is suggested. Test results based on a typical sample network have shown that the proposed feeder reconfiguration method can effectively reduce the PC value in the network, and the BPSO technique is efficient in searching for the optimal solution.