Survivability Assessment of a DG-enabled Power Distribution System through Network Reconfiguration

The topology of network reconfiguration is being widely used in electrical power distribution systems for many years now. This restructuring of the network provides an efficient solution to reduce the power loss and improve the overall voltage profile of the system significantly while requiring not much investment cost. This further improves the survivability of the power network. In this paper, a 10-bus power distribution network has been considered to analyze its survivability under several loading conditions. Distributed Generations (DGs) also play an important role to improve system survivability. This power grid survivability or resiliency with Distributed Generation (DG) included at specific buses has been also analyzed in this paper by evaluating a survivability index of the system. Lesser the survivability index, more will be the survivability of the system under any contingency (like fault, overloading etc.). The optimum network configuration with best survivability at a particular loading has been also determined here. A simulation load-flow is conducted in ETAP software for survivability assessment of a 10-bus power network.