Reconfiguration of distribution system using a binary programming model

Distribution system reconfiguration aims to choose a switching combination of branches of the system that optimize certain performance criteria of power supply while maintaining some specified constraints. The ability to automatically reconfigure the network quickly and reliably is a key requirement of self-healing networks which is an important part of the future Smart Grid system. We present a unified mathematical framework, which allows us to consider different objectives of distribution system reconfiguration problems in a flexible manner, and investigate its performance. The resulting optimization problem is in quadratic form which can be solved efficiently by using a quadratic mixed integer programming (QMIP) solver. The proposed method has been applied for reconfiguring different standard test distribution systems.