Feeder-switch relocation for customer interruption cost minimization

Most electricity service interruptions are due to failures in the distribution network. In a competitive market, service quality and reliability have become an essential part of the business. In order to enhance the reliability in the distribution system, a value-based method is proposed in this paper to take load distribution changes into account and search for new locations of feeder sectionalizers such that the customer interruption costs (CIC) can be reduced. Two stages are involved in the search. Using local information, the first stage determines the search direction and, in the second stage, it decides whether a crossover of the load point is beneficial. To avoid being trapped in a local minimum, a mutation technique is also applied to look for the global optimum. Actual feeders were used in the tests and test results have shown that with a proper adjustment of the feeder sectionalizers, service reliability can be improved and the customer outage costs are reduced.