Improving supply quality in distribution power networks: A game-theoretic planning approach

Abstract

Electric companies need to plan carefully the updates in their distribution power networks, assessing not only the expected impact on supply quality indicators, but also the cost of the different possibilities considered. To this end, we propose a planning method to improve the quality of supply in distribution power networks by upgrading devices so that they can be remotely operated. In the first place, our method identifies the lines with the lowest performance in an area of interest. Then, in each of these lines, the set of devices that can be upgraded is used to define the set of players of a cooperative game whose characteristic function provides a measure of the expected performance and economic impact of the updates in the infrastructure. Finally, the best locations to install remote control devices are determined by computing the Shapley value of this cooperative game, which, in addition, offers very valuable insight regarding each location considered. A case study based on a real substation in Spain is used to illustrate our approach and compare its performance with respect to the greedy-based method.