Optimal switching pattern planning is the main subject of distribution network reconfiguration to restore from blackout or to avoid blackout from maintenance and construction. This is a combinatorial optimization problem, and enumerative check of the every pattern is necessary to get the optimal solution.
Practically, successive heuristic search methods are adopted to get the quasi-optimal solution within a limited computation time. But a very long computing time is still required, when the problem size gets slightly larger. Step by step nature of the methods brings many iterations, though it assures satisfaction of the constraints. Reduction of the iterations is regarded to be necessary for the enhancement of processing speed.
In this paper, ‘supply adequacy’, is introduced as a new criteria index to guess the solution, which is obtained by fuzzy inference for each possible pair of source and load zone. The reconfiguration pattern is obtained at once or in a few processing steps, by assigning the each zone the source with the highest adequacy. Numerical examples show that the proposed method can get the solution faster than the ordinary method, more remarkably with the increase of problem size.