Optimal reconfiguration of electrical distribution systems considering reliability indices improvement

• A MISOCP model to solve the reconfiguration problem of EDS.
• The proposed model considering reliability indices improvement.
• The proposed model presents an efficient computational behavior with MISOCP solvers.
• The Pareto front for the proposed problem is easily found using a heuristic.

This paper presents a mixed-integer second-order conic programming (MISOCP) model to solve the reconfiguration problem of electrical distribution systems, considering the simultaneous minimization of total active power losses and improvement of customer-oriented reliability indices. The reliability indices considered in this paper are the system average interruption frequency index (SAIFI), the system average interruption duration index (SAIDI), and the energy not supplied (ENS). Under radiality, the proposed model satisfies the operational constraints of the reconfiguration problem, i.e., the voltage magnitude limits of the nodes and the current capacities of the conductors are not violated. The use of an MISOCP model guarantees convergence to optimality via convex optimization software tools. A multi-objective optimization approach is used to generate a full Pareto front surface that shows the conflict between the active power loss minimization and the improvement of the reliability indices in the reconfiguration problem. Finally, in order to test and verify the proposed methodology, a 43-node test system and a real 136-node system were employed.