Optimal participation of demand response aggregators in reconfigurable distribution system considering photovoltaic and storage units

Feeder reconfiguration is an important operational process in power distribution grids, which is implemented to enhance the system's performance by managing the switches. Given variations of the electricity price and load pattern in smart distribution networks, the operational problems of the distribution system are largely time-dependent and very complex. To deal with these temporal dependencies, it is important to extend the problem across different time intervals. Toward this end, a multi-objective optimization model is presented in this study for dynamic feeder reconfiguration problem in the distribution system over multiple time intervals considering distributed generators, energy storage systems, and solar photovoltaic units. The demand response program including interruptible/curtailable service is proposed to enable energy consumers to rethink their energy consumption patterns based on incentive and punitive policies. The common objectives considered in the feeder reconfiguration problem are power loss and voltage deviation which are important objectives for traditional distribution systems, but less attention has been paid to distribution network voltage security. This study considers operational cost, energy loss and voltage stability index as objective functions that can meet operational and voltage security expectations. Dynamic feeder reconfiguration problem is a complex integer nonlinear program problem and hence it is difficult to solve which requires the use of appropriate optimization algorithms to converge to global optima or find close to global optima. In this paper, a modified honey bee matting optimization algorithm based on the new mating mechanism is presented to solve the multi-objective dynamic feeder reconfiguration problem. The proposed approach uses an eliminating zone concept to finds a set of non-dominated solutions during the search process. Furthermore, a fuzzy decision-maker is adopted to select the best compromise solution among the non-dominated solutions. The suggested approach is tested on the IEEE 33-node and 136-node test systems and its superiorities are shown through comparison with other evolutionary algorithms.