A rolling horizon approach to distribution feeder reconfiguration with switching costs

We consider the feeder reconfiguration problem in distribution systems for the purpose of reducing system losses. Prior work to address this problem has primarily focused on minimizing the electricity losses at a given operating time and ignores the cost of switching operations. In our problem formulation, we have included a cost term to penalize frequent switching actions and focused on minimizing the operation cost over a specified planning horizon rather than at a fixed operating point. A rolling horizon framework is applied on top of the Dynamic Programming (DP) algorithm to search for the best combination of the hourly switching actions. The resulting solutions optimize the system performance while keeping the number of switching operations at a minimum level.