بهبود قابلیت اطمینان با استفاده از بهینه سازی کلینیک مورچه برای قرار دادن سوئیچ های دسته ای

Asset management and automation are acknowledged by distribution utilities as a useful strategy to improve service reliability, but the challenge facing decision makers is how to maximize the long-term return on a project whilst minimizing the investment and operation costs. The objective of this paper is reliability improvement by installing the optimum number of sectionalizing switches at appropriate locations in an electricity distribution network. This is achieved by adding new switches and the relocation of existing switches. Determining the number and location of switches become an optimization problem efficiently solved using an ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm. The performance of this approach is assessed in the paper and illustrated using various case studies on a typical UK distribution network. Test results show that the proposed ACO methodology provides an optimum solution based on a trade-off region between the reliability indices and cost of multiple switches.