A MILP model for optimal switch placement to enhance power distribution system performance in normal and hurricane conditions

Severe hurricanes can inflict significant damages in the order of several times the common network failures on both the distribution companies and consumers. Network reconfiguration and condition-based switching are the common actions for enhancing distribution network performance in both normal and emergency conditions. In this paper, a novel approach is presented for simultaneous improvement in resiliency, reliability, and power losses. A practical strategy is proposed by considering the coordination between load restoration and repair of damaged lines in optimal switch placement problems. The use of both remote-controlled switches (RCS) and manual switches (MS) as well as considering practical constraints related to line repair and load restoration leads to the increased number of decision variables and consequently the degraded performance of meta-heuristic methods to obtain the global optimum solutions, especially for larger scale networks. Therefore, the proposed approach uses the exact method of MILP to solve the optimization problem. In this context, the uncertainty related to damage status and repair time of lines during High-Impact Low-Probability (HILP) events is the main challenge in linear modeling of the problem for which new methods are provided in the study. The programming is coded in MATLAB and tested on a modified IEEE 33-bus network.