A single index for voltage quality ranking in the distribution power networks using multiple criteria decision-making

The quality of voltage is a fundamental characteristic that forms a crucial part of reliability in smart distribution power grids and subsequently being cautious to that is obligatory. Voltage quality (VQ) issues can be categorized into manifold categories such as voltage fluctuation, voltage harmonic distortion, voltage unbalance etc, depending upon the type of deviation from the standard sinusoidal one in terms of magnitude and frequency. For evaluating the VQ at a distribution system's bus, classically all the crucial phenomena associated indices are obligatory to be discretely measured and benchmarked for guaranteeing the global healthy VQ performance, which makes the assessment of the same a quite cumbersome. This paper attempts to streamline the overall VQ evaluation process by the application of multiple criteria decision-making. The scores of all VQ phenomena are computed by applying the analytic hierarchy process considering the multiple criteria of impacts on the consumer. The steps of the proposed methodology result in the formulation of an overall VQ index, which is alone adequate for raking the VQ performance of all the buses in a distribution power network. The proposed approach's application importance is checked and validated using data collected from a modified IEEE 13-bus test distribution system with and without the inclusion of distributed generation systems using MATLAB programming.