Summary Utilities confront challenges to optimally plan and develop the distribution grids both for reducing their imposed costs and for satisfying the customers' electricity needs. In this paper, optimal allocation of automatic and manual sectionalizing switches as well as protective devices is performed in presence of load flexibilities. Control devices could improve the duration‐based reliability indices, while protective devices could improve both duration‐based and frequency‐based reliability indices. In this paper, optimal incentives and penalties in the emergency demand response programs (EDRP) are determined based upon the customers' behaviors. The resulting optimization problem is then solved in 2 different scenarios: without load flexibility and incorporating EDRP. Finally, a standard reliability test system (RBTS4) is used to delineate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Furthermore, a sensitivity analysis is conducted to analyze the probability of customers' contribution in EDRP based upon the predetermined contracts.

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