Title:  Distribution System Service Restoration by Dynamic Programming Considering Switch Characteristics

Committee: 

Dr. Meliopoulos, Advisor 

Dr. Sun, Co-Advisor

Dr. Zhang, Chair

Dr. Saeedifard

Abstract: The objective of the proposed research is to design a systematic approach of finding the optimal switching sequence in distribution system restoration (DSR) problem. The purpose of DSR is to reconfigure the topology of distribution system through switching actions to restore power to customers subject to system faults. Many existing methods formulate DSR problems as single-step optimization problem where the only control devices are sectionalizers. The problem with this approach is that when various kinds of switches are present in the distribution system, certain sequence of switching actions need to be followed based on the different characteristics of the switches, which is not considered by the single-step optimization formulations. To the best of our knowledge, there hasn't been research reported in the literature that considers the characteristics of switches and couples this type of constraints in the optimization problem to derive feasible switching sequences in a systematic and mathematically rigorous way. By formulating the DSR problem as a dynamic programming (DP) problem, the solution can be found in a systematic way with guaranteed optimality. The formulation is flexible enough to allow for the incorporation of different objectives and operational constraints, which will be pursued in the future. A literature survey of DSR problem is presented in Chapter 2 of the proposal. The proposed method based on DP is introduced in Chapter 3 and its effectiveness will be demonstrated and validated through examples in Chapter 4. Chapter 5 concludes the proposal with a summary of work completed, future work as well as contributions of the work.