SVAPO-Based Reconfiguration and Vulnerability Assessment of Microgrids

Vulnerability Assessment (VA) is a solution to prevent Distribution Network (DN) outages that allow tie switches to be changed by Microgrid Reconfiguration (MR) to maintain voltage profile and power quality specifications while maintaining the radial structure. The Microgrid (MG) concept is scheduled predictably and is used as a temporary operation mechanism to recover the DN from a power outage. This paper presents criteria to identify the more vulnerable branches in the MG. The concept of fault chain is used to identify branches whose outages can lead to widespread outages. Also, a mass and particle algorithm minimizes an objective function with several variables, which can identify the optimal configuration and the most influential branches of the network. The proposed approach is applied to the IEEE 33-Bus test system, in which five additional buses related to Distribution Generation (DG) units are added, and a total of 38 buses are formed. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.