Decision Support for Smart Grid Planning and Operation Considering Reliability and All Available Resources

Two of the most important characteristic of a Smart Grid are: (a) working optimally, i.e., using the optimal topology and using optimally all available resources in order to minimize the overall planning costs while improve the reliability indexes; (b) the capability to adapt itself to a contingency, for instance, a load increase/decrease, a fault (automatic repair or removal from service the component in an outage situation, etc.). In these cases the reconfiguration of the distribution system must be performed to reroute supplies of energy to sustain power to all customers. This work will propose a new and innovative methodology with two models using a deterministic optimization technique to support power system planning and operation (reconfiguration) decision making in a smart grid context, in order to minimize the overall costs and the same time improve the reliability indexes.