Enhancing Power Distribution Feeders Restoration with a Probabilistic Crew Dispatch Method: Case Studies using Historical Data from a Brazilian Power Distribution Company

Abstract

This paper proposes a methodology to repair crews dispatch during distribution feeders restoration immediately after remotely controlled actions have been taken. Our method determines the sectors patrol sequence using the expected number of faults for each sector considering a previously calculated fault probability. Next, a road graph mapping of the buses is obtained by associating each bus with its real-world position. The crews’ route inside each sector is determined by the application of the nearest neighbor algorithm on that mapping. The case studies analyzed 24 real faults available in the database of a Brazilian power distribution company, and, a comparison was made between the time spent to locate the failures by simulating both the proposed methodology and the usual greedy strategy. The average time spent in localizing all the failures was from 9.49 % to 41.81 % shorter than in the usual method. Moreover, the speed and distance of repair crews showed weak influence in the crew dispatch methodology efficiency. Such results indicate an enhancement of the power distribution QoS indicators by using the proposed methodology to deal with faults.

Electric Power Distribution Maintenance Crews Routing for Fault Location: Time to Bite the Road-Network Disruptions Bullet

“…After a fault occurs on a power distribution system, customers can be reconnected to intact parts of the feeder or relocated to healthy interconnected feeders, when it is possible, by automated devices and remotely controlled or manually operated switches (Fanucchi et al, 2019a). Especially to restore as many customers as possible without violating the equipment's rating and isolate the faulted area.…”

“…Especially to restore as many customers as possible without violating the equipment's rating and isolate the faulted area. Sequentially, maintenance crews are dispatched to locate the fault and perform the repair (Fanucchi et al, 2019a).…”

“…After a fault occurs, customers can be reconnected to intact parts of the feeder or relocated to healthy interconnected feeders, when it is possible, by automated devices and remotely controlled or manually operated switches (Fanucchi et al, 2019a). Essentially, the utilities try to find the faults and restore the system as faster as possible, for which (Bahmanyar et al, 2017) compares several fault location procedures.…”

“…In a previous study, a stochastic method was proposed to adjust the number of required repair crews given a weather scenario (Fanucchi et al, 2019b). Other aspects involving power distribution system repair crews routing, such as vehicle average speed and crew's initial location were discussed in a methodology, which assumes feeder bars failure rate to guide the routing process (Fanucchi et al, 2019a). By involving metaheuristics, XiaoLiu Shen et al (2016) employed an improved ant colony algorithm to solve a patrol route planning model based on the vehicle routing problem.…”