Short-term Distribution Network Reconfiguration Considering Fuses Characteristics for Uninterrupted Voltage Improvement

In this article, a short-term distribution network reconfiguration problem is solved by considering the protection coordination as a constraint to improve the voltage profile in peak load emergencies. The prevailing view of this paper is that without focus on coordination of the final network topology, it allows the protective devices to pick up currents temporarily beyond their limits caused by switchings during a temporary peak load. Using an evolutionary search method, this article tries to solve the distribution network reconfiguration problem by minimizing the voltage deviations, switching time and switching numbers. It significantly considers distance-dependent time-lapses to satisfy the constraint of time-current characteristics of the protective devices during switchings. The proposed approach is investigated on a 16-bus sample network coordinated by fuses with the satisfactory improvement of the voltages with least interruption in comparison with reconfigurations ignoring this protection constraint.