A Reliability-Centered Outage Scheduling with Considering Daily Load Patterns and Load Transfer for Electrical Distribution Feeders

Working outages such as component maintenance/exchange and system extension are important causes resulting in out-of-service of customers in distribution systems. To have minimal frequency, duration, and loading of interruption while complete the scheduled works is much concerned in the more and more competitive power market. In this paper, a reliability-centered outage scheduling approach for distribution feeders is proposed. With considering daily load patterns, composite load profiles of the sections to be scheduled are exploited to find the minimal energy not supplied (ENS) during the outage. Availability of inter-feeder load transfer is considered to avoid unnecessary load interruptions in the scheduling. A set of reliability-grade variation (SRGV) is defined to guide the approach to find the reliability-centered solution. By using heuristic rules and SRGV defined, the proposed reliability-centered outage scheduling strategy performs effectively. A numerical example is illustrated to demonstrate the process and a practical system is simulated to test the effectiveness of the proposed approach.