A Grouping Method of Distribution Substations Using Cluster Analysis

Recently, it has been considered to group distribution substations together for evaluating the reinforcement planning of distribution systems. However, the grouping is carried out by the knowledge and experience of an expert who is in charge of distribution systems, and a subjective feeling of a human being causes ambiguous grouping at the moment. Therefore, a method for imitating the grouping by the expert has been desired in order to carry out a systematic grouping which has numerical corroboration. In this paper, we propose a grouping method of distribution substations using cluster analysis based on the interconnected power between the distribution substations. Moreover, we consider the geographical constraints such as rivers, roads, business office boundaries and branch boundaries, and also examine a method for adjusting the interconnected power. Simulations are carried out to verify the validity of the proposed method using an example system. From the simulation results, we can find that the imitation of the grouping by the expert becomes possible due to considering the geographical constraints and adjusting the interconnected power, and also the calculation time and iterations can be greatly reduced by introducing the local and tabu search methods.