Load areas in distribution systems

The updated and new monitoring and control functionalities for distribution systems make available a huge amount of information. Indeed, not all the available information is needed to be considered; a significant simplification could be achieved by selecting and treating only the relevant information. With this aim, the concept of Load Area (LA) was recently introduced: a LA is a group of prosumers whose power injection has a similar impact on the distribution grid operating conditions. In the paper, the concept of LA is adopted to select the relevant data needed for the monitoring and control of distribution systems; a possible compact equivalent representation of the relationships between those data is proposed. The results from two test cases confirm the viability of the proposed modeling and highlight a relevant reduction in the amount of information used to describe the network.