Distributed processing of reliability index assessment and reliability-based network reconfiguration in power distribution systems

Parallel and distributed processing has been broadly applied to scientific and engineering computing, including various aspects of power system analysis. This paper first presents a distributed processing approach of reliability index assessment (RIA) for distribution systems. Then, this paper proposes a balanced task partition approach to achieve better efficiency. Next, the distributed processing of RIA is applied to reliability-based network reconfiguration (NR), which employs an algorithm combining local search and simulated annealing to optimize system reliability. Testing results are presented to demonstrate the speeded execution of RIA and NR with distributed processing.