A New Perspective on Distribution Network Reconfiguration with Renewable Uncertainties

This paper presents a new perspective on the distribution network reconfiguration (DNR) problem in the event of a planned or unplanned branch opening of a distribution system coupled with intermittent renewable sources. The main constraints for this line outage-driven DNR are to energize the maximum possible loads to improve system reliability and retain radiality to facilitate enhanced protective coordination. The objectives considered for this novel DNR approach, termed with a reverse-reconfiguration algorithm, are lowering real power loss to boost system efficiency, reducing node voltage deviation to improve power quality and minimizing energy-not-served to enhance system reliability. A fuzzy framework embedded with heuristic methods is adopted to solve the proposed multi-objective reverse-reconfiguration problem for obtaining the optimal open/close status of the sectionalizing and tie switches present in the reconfigurable distribution network. Moreover, a worst-case realization based approach is adopted to model the intrinsic uncertainties of the green generators. The efficacy of the suggested method is verified through examples.