Effective Service Restoration in Electrical Distribution Networks Using a Bi-Stage Algorithm

In Electrical Distribution System (EDS), usually following an outage, significant time is spent on fault locating, isolating the fault area, and energizing upstream and downstream loads. In addition to dissatisfaction in customers, electricity interruption even for a few seconds, can cause huge damages to advanced industries or critical customers. Currently, EDSs are equipped with Manually Switches (MS) and Remote Controlled Switches (RCS). The heuristic Service Restoration (SR) algorithm of this paper is a Bi-Stage algorithm that at the first stage quickly restore energy to some loads using RCSs and in the second stage, all types of switches (MSs and RCSs) are used to complete the SR process. Here, to solve the SR problem, minimizing Energy Not Supplied (ENS) is selected as the objective function. The proposed SR algorithm was applied on a sample network in different situations. In addition to using a Bi-Stage SR algorithm to minimize ENS and re-energizing customers in the shortest time after fault, taking into account the actual network conditions such as load profiles, network operation constraints, and providing switching sequence also increase the attractiveness of the proposed algorithm. Finally, it was proved that, using the proposed SR algorithm it is possible to achieve optimal and efficient solutions meeting today's EDSs needs.