An Operational Planning Approach Distribution Automation Considering the Contribution of Demand Response Programs in Service Restoration Process

This paper proposes an advanced distribution automation planning problem in which emergency-based demand response plans are incorporated during service restoration process. The fitness function of this planning problem consists of various costs associated with fault occurrence in electric distribution systems consisting of the total yearly cost of customers’ interruptions, the total annualized investment cost of control and protection devices deployment, including sectionalizing switches, circuit breakers, and fuses and the total annual cost of performing emergency-based demand response programs in the service restoration process. Moreover, the customers’ behavior in participating in the service restoration process is also modeled through using an S-function. The proposed advanced distribution automation planning method is implemented on the fourth bus of the Roy Bilinton test system in order to evaluate its efficacy. The obtained results show that the reliability indices and the total cost of distribution automation are reduced by about 9% and 12% more than the published methods for distribution automation, respectively.