NEPLAN | Optimal Network Restoration Strategy

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This module is designed to study the impact of single forced (e.g. fault on a line) or planned outages on the electrical distribution system. It finds the optimal switching plan to restore electrical power to customers. It may be used as an off-line application to pre-define strategies in case of outages or as an on-line application to help the network operator  find quickly the correct strategy after a fault has occurred.

The following objective functions are implemented:

  • Minimize network losses
  • Minimize the number of overloaded elements
  • Minimize the average loadings of the elements
  • Maximize the average voltage

Restoration Stages

  • Four stages in the restoration strategy will be evaluated and may be stored in a fault history database:
    • Occurrence of the fault
    • Isolation of the fault. NEPLAN shows the unsupplied customers
    • Re-supply of customers which are affected by the fault. NEPLAN shows which customer are re-supplied again
    • Normalization of the network after the repair of the fault
  • All stages of the selected optimal restoration plan with the new switch positions will be graphically displayed on the single line diagram

DMS On-Line Application

  • Results with the new switch positions of all re-supply stages, including all objective functions are displayed as spreadsheet tables or can be accessed as text file for further evaluation (e.g. in DMS applications)
  • All dialogues and restoration algorithms are available through a C/C++ API, the NPL – NEPLAN Programming Library. With NPL NEPLAN data and functions can be accessed with a user written C/C++ program. This allows building up customized restoration strategies for network operators