Distributed Self-Healing for Distribution Grids With Evolving Search Space

The medium-voltage grid is often planned in loops, but operated in a radial structure to allow a robust protection scheme. This allows the reconfiguration of the grid. This paper focuses on reconfiguration after a fault to re-establish the service, also referred to as self-healing. It includes the localization of faults and finds new grid configurations based on the actual status of the grid. The solving of the reconfiguration problem is nonpolynomial difficult. Finding an acceptable solution to resupply nonfaulted grid parts under tight time limits is difficult. The innovative contribution of this paper is an approach that finds new configurations as local as possible to the faulty area, evolvingly increasing the search space. New configurations are generated based on a heuristic method relying on graph theory. An aggregated fitness function is used to evaluate the solutions. For the realization, a distributed control architecture in the form of an advanced substation automation is proposed.