Availability-Based Distribution Circuit Design for Shipboard Power System

The electric distribution circuit design problem has been primarily approached from the perspective of minimizing circuit losses. Motivated by the requirement for higher service continuity, we propose a graph theory based approach for the distribution circuit design problem. A mathematical formulation for designing a resilient circuit topology aiming to minimize the number of conductors while satisfying a given network availability constraint is developed first. A computationally efficient algorithm, termed successive minpath generation to solve the formulated topology design problem is proposed next. The proposed algorithm reduces the double exponential search space for the resilient circuit topology to polynomial time allowing a tractable solution for the topology design problem. The algorithm is applied to design the circuit topology for the zonal electric distribution (ZED) circuit of an all-electric ship supplied by single as well as multiple power sources. Compared with grid topology, the proposed approach results in circuit topologies with network availability more than 0.99 by using 3 fewer and 12 fewer conductors for a 15-node and a 30-node ZED, respectively.