Optimal Network Reconfiguration of Electric Power Distribution System for Power Loss Reduction and Voltage Profile Improvement

Abstract

The aim of reconfiguring electric power distribution network under
normal operating conditions is to reduce the total power losses of
the network or to balance the load of the system’s feeders which is
an important part of the distribution network operation to improve
system availability, reliability and stability. However, the three
main objectives of the distribution network engineers are power
losses minimization, maintenance of good voltage profile and
minimum feeders’ current levels. This paper proposed optimal
network reconfiguration (ONR) for the Ugbowo 2x15MVA,
33/11kV distribution network to reduce the high system power
losses, balance the feeders’ load and improve the voltage profiles.
The binary version of the particle swarm optimization (BPSO)
algorithm was used to optimally select the switches and it was
programmed in MATPOWER and ran in MATLAB 2017a version.
The simulation results revealed that the proposed technique
optimally select the switches that produce the best configuration
which gives minimum power losses, reduce the load balance index,
balance the feeders’ load and improve the system’s voltage profile
in most of the buses within acceptable limits of ±6%.