A decomposition approach to optimal remote controlled switch allocation in distribution systems

The growing demand for improved quality of service increases the importance of network automation, namely the investment in remote-controlled switch (RCS) devices. These allow improving the fault isolation and reconfiguration time and there fore increasing the system quality of service. The investment in switch devices comes at a cost and thus must be optimized. The problem of determining the optimal number of devices and their optimal location is a difficult problem: the solution space is combinatorial and the objective function is nonanalytical. We propose to address this problem in a two-stage decomposition approach. Results are presented to i) divide the solution space into independent subspaces, and then ii) solve the optimization problems in each sub-space. The solution approach is illustrated for a real distribution network problem.