REPUBLIC OF SERBIA

MINISTRY OF DEFENCE

www.mod.gov.rs

MINISTRY OF DEFENCE

Material Resources Sector

Defensive Technologies Department

Military Technical Institute

www.vti.mod.gov.rs

NETWORK RECONFIGURATION IN BALANCED DISTRIBUTION SYSTEMS FOR ACTIVE POWER LOSS REDUCTION BY BRANCH EXCHANGE METHOD

BRANKO STOJANOVIĆ

Technical Testing Center, Belgrade, elektronika@toc.vs.rs, stojanovic.branko@rocketmail.com

Abstract: Network reconfiguration is done by changing the status of the switches, mainly for two reasons, active power loss reduction and load balancing and it attracts attention of distribution engineers for quite a long period of time. In this article general formulation and solving method for the active power loss reduction is given. Searching of the relevant radial configurations is used in this problem by the branch exchange method. To aid the search, two approximate power flow methods with varying degree of accuracy have been developed. Applied Fortran programs are very efficient and fast but can be used only as indication for the loss estimation because of the insufficient method accuracies. At each iteration end it is necessary to run efficient power flow algorithm to determine the real situation concerning loss reduction and go on from this point of calculation. Numerical example for Baran and Wu network is given at the end of the work which indicates the possibility of application of these two approximate methods. Though only indicative, developed methods converge to the global optimum what is given in a numerical example. The time duration of the used methods depends thoroughly on the fast manipulation of incoming data files which give necessary information of network configuration in concern. This flaw makes methods interesting for the time being only in planning stage when the process duration is not of primary importance.

Keywords: network configuration, switches, active power loss, power flow algorithm, branch exchange.