بهبود قابلیت اطمینان در سیستم های توزیع برق با استفاده از اتوماسیون توزیع کننده پیشرفته Reliability Improvement of Power Distribution Systems using Advanced Distribution Automation

I. INTRODUCTION In the contemporary world, the electrical distribution system is the backbone of the smart grid environment. However, most of customer outages are a result of the distribution networks, where 80% of customer interruptions attribute to faults and component failure at the feeder level [1]. Conventional distribution systems do not involve much automation i.e. rely mainly on manual operations, and do not have any communication or information exchange i.e. blind system. During system events, the absence of monitoring and lack of information with increasing failure rate would dramatically increase the duration and number of customers affected by specific outage. The technical impact will appear in decreasing the reliability level of the network and the quality of supply. The significant economic impact of this would be observed in increasing the outages cost of utility and their customers. For these reasons, improving system reliability and power quality becomes an important issue. Keeping the above problems in mind, distribution automation (DA) is the key answer to many challenges facing electrical distribution networks. Referring to electrical power research institute (EPRI), advanced distribution automation system (ADAS) has been defined as “a fully controllable and flexible distribution system that will facilities the exchange of electrical energy and information between participants and system components” [2], [3]. The expected results of applying DA on medium voltage (MV) distribution networks include, for example, reliable, resilience, selfhealing, fully controllable and efficient distribution system for energy delivery to end users in customers’ domain. Much of efforts that depend upon modernizing the distribution network are accomplished and many utilities around the world started distribution automation projects [4]-[9].