Optimal placement of fuses and switches in active distribution networks using value-based MINLP

Contingency conditions in distribution networks create financial losses for different parts of the system including electricity customers, electricity retailers, distributed generation (DG) units, etc. Therefore, protective device allocation methods have been introduced in recent years to enhance the reliability of the power system. In this study, a new formulation is proposed to find the optimal places of sectionalizing switches and fuses while taking the financial loss of both electricity customers and DG units into account. The current method has the flexibility to consider DG effect on any location of the network and its islanded operation in case of contingencies. Moreover, the uncertainty in load and renewable generation is taken into account using stochastic programming. The results demonstrate that the DG units and their financial loss can change the results of switch and fuse placement dramatically when there are no tie switches in the network. Furthermore, it is found that this method can decrease the total reliability costs by 3.86% when high penetration of DG units is introduced into a modified Roy Billinton test system (RBTS). The problem is modeled as a mixed-integer nonlinear (MINLP) formulation and is handled using BARON solver in GAMS environment.