Application of Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm for Optimal Distribution Protection Design

摘要

Today more electric utilities consider momentary outages as an important customer issue, primarily due to their impact on new types of fault-sensitive loads. In this paper Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm is used for multiobjective optimization of SAIFI, SAIDI and MAIFI_E grid reliability indices. Optimization is performed considering both the optimized allocation of protective devices and switches as well as the definition of the protection scheme to be employed in the reclosers and substation breakers: fuse saving or fuse blowing. The main goal of the paper is to adapt and test the ABC algorithm for a constrained, non-linear optimization problem with a non-differentiable objective function, inherent for a task of protection devices optimal allocation in a power grid. The algorithm is tested on a distribution system model with 51 buses in MATLAB. The results show an applicability and effectiveness of the proposed method for the specified problem.