2017 7th International Conference on Power Systems (ICPS)
College of Engineering Pune, India. Dec 21-23, 2017
Optimal Tie Line Placement of Distribution
System Incorporating Performance Based Rates
Aprajay Verma
Department of Electrical Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology
Chennai,India
Email:ee16s034@smail.iitm.ac.in
Abstract—In this paper optimal tie line placement problem
is solved focusing on minimization of penalties incurred
by Distribution System Operator(DSO) for not meeting
reliability standardVA discrete function of penalty rate
was taken which varies increasingly with interruption time.
The risk profiles of each load was simulated by Monte
Carlo simulation method considering failure outage data of
the feeders and lateral transformers.A graph theory based
distribution load flow has been conducted and optimal tie line
location was found out by fundamental loop based algorithm.
Keywords—Reward and penalty schemes, Tie line place-
ment, Performance based rates, Monte carlo simulation,
Fundamental loops
I. I NTRODUCTION
Distribution System Operators(DSO) in deregulated
market systems these days have to meet with certain reli-
ability standards , the motivation to do so comes from the
reward and penalty scheme(RPS) [1] imposed by system
regulators. These schemes have certain target levels for
reliability standards and regulator usually imposes reward
and penalty based on whether DSO has met those target
levels or not. The development method for the regulator
to enforce such a regulation was studied in [2] ,the study
was conducted for three scenarios with planning method
made from only regulator’s point of view, another study
[3] used Monte-Carlo simulation to get average number of
worst case scenario . It has been seen that the quality of
supply can be improved considerably if the optimization is
done in planning stage itself. Hence ,there was a need of a
study that incorporated RPS scheme at the planning stage
itself.The key element of planning stage of distribution
system is placement of tie line ,the reliability of system
is severely impacted by the position of tie lines which are
used in system to restore power in a bus when it has to
be isolated due to occurrence of faults in particular feeder.
The tie line placement problem in past has been solved by
various formulation [4] [5] but all of them include usage
of mean failure rate which cannot give the probability
of various interruption level in a system which makes
impossible for DSO to properly estimate the penalty or
reward that a particular placement of tie line will give as
Reward/Penalty rate changes with average customer cost
and moreover, traditionally N-1 criteria is used which has
not been proven to be cost effective [6] as it does not take
cognizance of probobality of each failure.
978-1-5386-1789-2/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE 591
K. Shanti Swarup
Department of Electrical Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology
Chennai,India
Email:swarup@ee.iitm.ac.in
A. Literature Review
Tie line planning problem using probabilistic load flow
model for transmission systems in [7] ,reliability and
availability analysis of transmission network was done
[8], a hybrid method of fuzzy set and Monte Carlo
simulation for reliability evaluation has been proposed
in [9],optimization of substation assets has been done
using petri net model support for Monte Carlo simulation
in [10]. A method for power deliveries for companies
to integrate performance based rates in overall business
model was proposed in [11] , a reliability index probability
distributions are used to establish an appropriate balance
between reliability improvement and cost saving strategies
in [12], a tool for assessing the uncertainties of system
reliability and the information to manage PBR risk has
been developed in [13]. A graph theory based network
flow analysis has been used to determine the maximum
flow that can be transported between two nodes within a
directed graph [14]. A novel graph theory based approach
has been used for restoring large scale power systems
affected by complete blackout [15].A power load flow
solution has been solved by a directed graph with edges
represented by a transmission line in [16]. A fast method
has been proposed which can decide downstream and
upstream power flow in [17].
This paper includes formulation based on risk levels of
various loads, the risk levels were obtained by time se-
quential Monte-Carlo simulation [18] simulated in Python
and C. The reliability level of loads is strongly dependent
on the reliability of components feeding it, in [19] it was
found that failure rate of breakers and bus bars is very
less as compared to transformers and lines hence in this
study only failure rates of transformers and lines was con-
sidered. Failure outage data was obtained from [19] and
reward/penalty rates were referred from [1]. An algorithm
based on fundamental loop was used to find the optimal
buses for tie line placement. The contents of paper are
summarized as follows section II describes implementation
of Monte Carlo simulation, section III describes reward
and penalty schemes, section IV describes the applied
algorithm and section V results and conclusion.
II. M ONTE C ARLO S IMULATION
Monte Carlo simulation for power system has been in
use for quite sometime.It involves generation of random
number following a particular probability curve,in this pa-
per inverse transformation method has been used [20] to do
 Start
Line 1
Bus 3
Read database
Line 0
Bus 0 Bus 2 Line 2
Line 3 Count=0
Bus 4 Bus 1

Get Branch and Transformer Switch Status

Figure 1: Directed graph describing the downstream nodes of bus2

the same. The analyses was done at 11KV level and only
permanent outages were considered. The probability of Check if switch No
failure of component was modeled by exponential distribu- status have change Count+=1
from last iteration
tion and the probability of time to repair was modeled by
log-normal distribution [21].The simulation for one year
was conducted by dividing time sequence into blocks of
15 minutes. Each sample had an independent set of switch
Yes
statuses for each feeder and transformer.Moreover voltage
profile of each load was also observed by conducting Condition incident matrix according to switch status
distribution load flow.
In order to calculate the net load faced by each bus a Detect leaf nodes
graph theory based algorithm was followed. The network
was represented by directed graph with feeder always
Prepare tree using all the information collected above
pointing towards source nodes.The loads faced by each
bus were calculated by eq. 1.
 Do Distribution Load Flow to get Network Data

Sj = Si,j + Si,b (1)

bGj Collect the relevant statistics

Sj :- Total Load at Bus j

Si,j :- Actual Load being drawn at Bus j Executed in C
Gj :- Set of all downstream nodes w.r.t. bus j
Count
Fig. 1 explains the directed graph used to calculate ≤ 35040
Yes
Executed in Python
the loads of bus 2 in the given 5 bus network.As seen
in this figure the load faced by bus 2 will be loads of
No
downstream buses (in red) in addition to the load at bus 2 Stop
itself. Now the current in each feeder is calculated similar
to the forward sweep of forward backward algorithm but to Figure 2: Flow chart describing the Monte Carlo simulation for one year
calculate the bus voltages we went forward again and use
the potential drop in lines obtained from current values in
first forward sweep to calculate bus voltages recursively. level of 95% . The inequality in eq. 2 has to be transformed
The following flowchart Fig. 2 explains the simulation to an equality by taking the greatest bound as in eq. 3 and
for one year the number of years for which simulation was solved by non linear one dimensional root finding
has to be conducted to get a statistically valid result algorithm .
is determined by convergence criteria. Convergence of  inf
2 −y 2 /2 2E|α|3
Monte Carlo simulation was obtained by application of √ √ e dy + √ √ = 0.05
Bikeliss theorem and central limit theorem as given in 2π 10−5σ N N (σ + 10−5 N )3
[20]. The final equation that came was (3)
 inf III. R EWARD AND P ENALTY S CHEMES
2 2 2AE|α|3
√ √ e−y /2 dy + √ √ ≤ρ (2) In deregulated market the utility offering minimum price
2π ξ σN N (σ + ξ N )3
to customer prevails, this has regulated in reduction of the
α :- Set of I.I.D. variable cost invested by utility on maintenance which has caused
σ :- Standard deviation of α decrease in customer reliability. Therefore, a regulating
N :- Number of values in α mechanism was required that should give incentive to the
ξ :- Required level of accuracy level utility for increasing its reliability standard. In order to
ρ :- Confidence level solve this problem system regulator started implementing
A :- constant between 1 and √12π reward and penalty schemes or performance based rates. A
System Average Interruption Frequency Index(SAIFI) method has been develop in [2] for regulators to prescribe
was taken as convergence parameter , mean and standard rates using customer interruption costs, variation in the
deviation was estimated by taking one year worth of sam- DSOs financial risk and to limit the DSOs financial risk. In
ples the accuracy was taken to be 10−5 having confidence this paper a discrete pricing scheme is taken, discretization

592
 ·104
Line 1
1 Bus 3
Line 0
Bus 0 Bus 2 Line 2
0.5 Line 3
Bus 4 Bus 1
Price(£/hr)

0 Figure 4: 5 bus sytem taken under consideration

Table I: Table showing expected penalty obtained

−0.5
Sno. Bus no. Expectation of Penalty/Reward(£/hr)
1 0 -3022.1349
−1 2 1 -11019.27
3 2 -4928.596
0 5 7 12 14
4 3 -8548.732
Number of time samples(x15min) 5 4 -8150.66

Figure 3: Reward and Penalty rate considered per customer

Carlo Simulation was carried out in intel i7 2.3 GHz 4 core

has been done based on prices in [1] . The cost function
C(x) in end looks like Fig. 3 .It can be seen that this
function has 5 levels. The expectation of reward/penalty
of each bus is dependent on the probabilities of cumulative
probability distribution of its CAIDI(Customer Average
Interruption Duration Index) calculated by Monte Carlo
Simulation.
IV. F UNDAMENTAL L OOP BASED A LGORITHM
Fundamental Loop is a closed path with all the
branches except one belonging to the cut-sets of
graph.This situation corresponds to the one in distribution
systems, where the network is already radial in nature
which has topology similar to tree and addition of tie
line will form a fundamental loop.The fundamental loop
can be characterized uniquely by buses it traverses. Our
objective is to find location of tie line that gives us
maximum reduction in utility’s penalty due to outages.
Hence, the algorithm in this paper checks for the sum
of expectation of rewards/penalties in each buses in all
the possible fundamental loops and select the loop which
gives us the minimum value.
A. Problem Formulation
The problem can be seen as a minimization problem
in which minimum value is to be picked from a discrete
set of numbers, now if we define Ωj being a set of all
fundamental loops present in a network and j being an
element of Ωj than our problem corresponds to
Select j such that Cj gives minimum value, where

Cj = Ei (penalty/reward) jΩj (4)
iFj
Fj :- Set of all the buses in fundamental loop j
Ei :- Expectation of Penalty/reward of bus i
V. R ESULTS
A five bus system shown in Fig. 4 was taken for study
the data for the system is given in Tab. III, it was assumed
that only one tie line is available for dispatch .The Monte
processor in ubuntu-debian environment, multiprocessing
was used to fasten the process and data was handled by
SQLite database. For calculating eq. 3 brent method was
used which was implemented in python. On solving eq. 3
for N it was found out that it will take 2840 years of worth
data for simulation to converge taking System Average
Interruption Frequency Index as convergence parameter
. Hence, Simulation corresponding to one year was ran
2840 times. The loads of all the bus were taken as
0.534+j0.308p.u. and failure rate of lateral transformer is
taken as 0.0150 and average repair time as 10hr.The base
voltage is taken as 11KV and base power as 1MW. After
Monte Carlo simulations following CAIDI were obtained
Fig. 7-11.It can be seen that the probability distribution
curve of bus 0 is different in shape as compared to others,
the reason being that as bus 0 is source node the cause
of failure of a load is dependent only on failure of lateral
transformers, while for other buses the major cause of load
outage is the failure in lines coming in the path containing
load and source buses. The Expected penalty of each nodes
in Tab. I were calculated using these CAIDI plots and cost
curve obtained in Fig. 3
All the fundamental loops of the network were tabulated
and the one which showed minimum value of Cj was
chosen for installation of tie line. In this case it can be
seen in the Tab. II that fundamental loop 7 has the least
value of Cj and the tie line can be installed between 3-1
Fig. 5 as all other edges of loop are already the part of
the initial network.
Line 1 Tie-line
Bus 3
Line 0
Bus 0 Bus 2 Line 2
Line 3
Bus 4 Bus 1
Figure 5: Final System showing tie-line location

593
 Table II: Table showing Cj values of fundamental loops
location of tie line, cost analysis can also be done to
Sno. Fundamental loop Value of Cj (£/hr)
calculate the return of investment by subtracting the cost
1 0-2-0 -14041.4137 of installing the tie line by the amount of money saved
2 0-2-4-0 -16101.391 due to decrease in penalties.
3 0-2-4-1-0 -27120.6609
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VII. A PPENDIX
This Appendix includes the branch data of system taken
into consideration and the probability distribution function
observed of all the buses.
Table III: Branch data of system taken

Sno. Impedance(p.u./km) Length(km) Failure rate(occ./km-year) Repair time(hr)

0 0.0120+j0.003 1 0.0650 5
1 0.0120+j0.003 2 0.0650 5
2 0.0120+j0.003 3 0.0650 5
3 0.0120+j0.003 4 0.0650 5 Figure 9: Probability distribution function of CAIDI of bus2

Figure 10: Probability distribution function of CAIDI of bus3

Figure 7: Probability distribution function of CAIDI of bus 0

Figure 8: Probability distribution function of CAIDI of bus 1

Figure 11: Probability distribution function of CAIDI of bus4

595