Reconfiguration of Power Distribution Systems in the Presence of Voltage-Dependent Loads

Load power can be changed by voltage fluctuation of network buses, in which reconfiguring the topology of distribution systems impacts the magnitude of bus voltages. Only a few papers have considered voltage-dependent loads in their reconfiguration models but introduced nonlinear formulations or highly approximated linear approaches. While nonlinear models can be solved by metaheuristic algorithms without guaranteeing the optimality of solutions or may be implemented by commercial nonlinear solvers, they require intensive and time-consuming computations. Moreover, linearized models are highly approximated by piecewise linear functions with many unknown parameters. Thus, this paper presents the effective design of the reconfiguration problems, including voltage dependency of loads, which can be solved using commercial linear solvers. The proposed models are precise enough to find accurate results for the reconfiguration problem and are adequately fast to converge to optimal solutions. The results show that the proposed solutions not only reduce active power losses significantly but increase the minimum voltage of the system effectively.