Optimal Placement of Reclosers in a Radial Distribution System for Reliability Improvement

There is a need for the optimal positioning of protective devices to maximize customers satisfaction per their demands. Such arrangement advances the distribution system reliability to maximum achievable. Thus, radial distribution system (RDS) reliability can be improved by placing reclosers at suitable feeder sections. This article presents comprehensive details of an attempt to determine the reclosers' optimal location in an RDS to maximize the utility profit by reliability improvement. Assessment of different reliability indices such as SAIDI, SAIFI, CAIFI, CAIDI, etc., with recloser placement, exhibits a considerable improvement in these indices in contrast with the absence of recloser. Consequently, a new bidirectional formulation has been proposed for the optimized arrangement of reclosers'. This formulation efficiently handles the bidirectional power flow, resulting from distributed generation (DG) unit (s) in the system. The proposed model has been solved for a test system by utilizing the Genetic algorithm (GA) optimization method. Later, test results conclude that reclosers' optimal placement contributes significantly towards utility profit with minimum investment and outage costs.