Toward Optimal Multiperiod Network Reconfiguration for Increasing the Hosting Capacity of Distribution Networks

A multiperiod network reconfiguration to meet the requirement of hourly hosting capacity under a minimal required number of switching operations, taking into consideration the uncertainty of renewable generation, is formulated as a nonlinear, nondifferentiable integer optimization problem with nonlinear equality and inequality constraints. A four-stage solution methodology, including an assessment stage, a time-partitioning stage, an optimization stage, and an evaluation stage, is developed to solve the constrained large-scale nonlinear integer optimization problem. A fuzzy C-means clustering algorithm is applied to partition the time period to facilitate the design of a minimum-number switching solution. A hybrid particle swarm optimization algorithm is developed to find an optimal network topology for each partitioned time period. The IEEE 123-bus case and a 1001-node system, three-phase and unbalanced, are used to evaluate the proposed method with promising results.