Reliability Improvement and Loss Minimization by Optimal Distribution Network Reconfiguration

Reliability improvement is a fundamental aspect of modern power distribution systems and smart grids. The optimal distribution network reconfiguration (DNR) has been proven an effective and economic way to improve system's reliability. This paper overcomes the nonlinearity of the DNR problem constraints and thus presents a convex model for optimal DNR with the objective of 1) reliability indices improvement, and 2) power loss minimization. The proposed second-order cone programming based method is tested on a 69-bus distribution system examining different scenarios for the weighting coefficients of the objective function's terms. The obtained results demonstrate the effectiveness and usefulness of the proposed optimization model.