Optimal Placement of Remote Controlled Switches in Electric Power Distribution Systems with a Meta-heuristic Approach

In the present work the problem of Optimal Placement of remote controlled switches, through the replacement of installed manual switches, in Electric Power Distribution Systems with radial configuration is approached, considering economic, technical, operational and social aspects. The approach used for the identification of strategic points is based on the implementation of meta-heuristic algorithms for optimization with multiple objectives. For the evaluation of each solution, an evaluating function based on the Monte Carlo method is implemented, which estimates the defined indices through the simulation of failures in the network, whose probabilities are obtained using the Reliability Block Diagram method. Three different multi-objective algorithms were implemented and their results compared using the hypervolume metric, having the Generalized Differential Evolution 3 algorithm the best performance.