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CANIZES et al.: OPTIMAL APPROACH FOR RELIABILITY ASSESSMENT IN RADIAL DISTRIBUTION NETWORKS
TABLE II
REPAIR TIME REDUCTIONS AND COSTS FOR EACH ACTION
the considered value for equivalent hour loss Te is 4500 h.
More detailed information on equivalent hour loss can be
found in [36].
The detailed data related to the repair time and failure rate
reductions, as well as their costs, can be found in Tables II
and III.
Only lines, cables, and distributed generators were consid-
ered for possible failures for this case study. It is assumed that
the substation has 100% availability. For the distributed
generators, only actions to reduce repair time can be applied.
The actions that the system operator can apply to reduce the
repair time are as follows:
a) increasing the operation personnel (IOP);
b) automation system upgrade (ASU);
c) communications upgrade (CUp).
The actions that the system operator can apply to reduce the
failure rate are as follows:
a) reinforcing a line (RL);
b) placing a new line in parallel with an existing one (PNL);
c) redesign link layout (RLL).
Each one of these actions has a cost and results in a repair
time and failure rate reduction for each system component.
7
TABLE III
FAILURE RATE REDUCTIONS AND COSTS FOR EACH ACTION
A set of 1000 random weights is determined. The NSE cost
is 2 m.u./kVAh, and the loss cost is 0.07 m.u./kVAh. For the
NSE cost, investment cost, loss cost, and capacitor cost, a
discount rate of 1.75% is considered for a ten-year project
lifetime, which leads to a CRF equal to 0.110.
MATLAB has been used to develop the algorithm to obtain
the Pareto front, to generate randomly the set of weights, and
to deal with the results. Based on the weighted Pareto front
method, mixed-integer nonlinear programming is developed
[see (14)–(41)] and applied in order to identify the distribution
network components. A computer with one processor Intel
Xeon E3-1225 3.20 GHz with four cores, 4 GB of random
access memory, and Windows 8 Professional 64-bit operating
system was used for this case study.
Fig. 5 depicts the diagram of the 33-bus distribution
network [25]. Two DG units with 500 kW, 250 kVAr in buses
11 and 27 have been considered. Due to the nonexistence of
the outage data for this test system, an outage database has
been created in order to apply the proposed methodology.
This database can be found in Table IV. The initial data of the
network are presented in Table V.
The initial losses are obtained running a power flow for
distribution networks based on the algorithm of Thukaram et
al. [38].A total of 223 non dominated solutions
(corresponding to 223 investment plans) was obtained in the
network of the case study is by the weighted ac optimization
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8 IEEE SYSTEMS JOURNAL

TABLE V
INITIAL DATA FOR 33-BUS DISTRIBUTION NETWORK

TABLE VI
COSTS FOR PLAN 35 CONSIDERING TEN YEARS OF PROJECT LIFETIME

TABLE VII
INCOME FOR TEN YEARS OF PROJECT LIFETIME CONSIDERING PLAN 35

Fig. 5. Single-line 33-bus distribution network (adapted from [25]).

TABLE IV
OUTAGE DATA FOR 33-BUS DISTRIBUTION NETWORK TABLE VIII
FINAL BENEFIT FOR TEN YEARS OF PROJECT LIFETIME
CONSIDERING PLAN 35

method. This multiobjective is developed to achieve reduction

in repair times and failure rate of considered distribution
network components, reduces forced outage rate and which
improves the reliability.
The fuzzy satisfying decision method [30]–[32] is used to
select the preferred solution among nondominated solutions
obtained in optimization stage. Thus, plan 35 is selected. This
plan presents as weights w1 = 0.8379, w2 = 0.0931, w3 =
0.0346, and w4 = 0.0344. Table VI presents the results for each
term of the objective function, which lead to a total of 1 506
118 m.u. for ten years of project lifetime.
Table VII presents the incomings for NSE and losses.
Table VIII presents an economic evaluation and the total
benefit for the system operator. As can be seen in this table,
considering plan 35, the operator has 119 908 m.u. of benefit
with 8.1 years and 12.04% of payback and internal rate of
return, respectively.
Table IX presents the optimized reliability indexes when plan
35 is considered. The methodology leads to a high reduction in
NSE (69%), as we can see in this table, and in CAIDI (63%).