Virtual Node Based Distribution Network Reliability Evaluation and Its Implementation on Parallel Computing Platform

Reliability evaluation is one of the most important assessments of the distribution network in its planning, which requires the usage of topology models and parameters from the distribution network automation system. To accelerate the reliability evaluation process of large-scale distribution networks, this paper proposes a virtual node-based reliability evaluation algorithm, which divides a feeder into feeder domains, load blocks, and virtual nodes. A virtual node based forward/ backward sweep algorithm is used to replace the minimum cut set based traditional approach, so the computation scale is reduced significantly. Based on the proposed evaluation algorithm, its parallel implementation on Apache Spark platform is given. The experiment result proved the effeteness and performance of the proposed approaches.