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The Dispatch Problems in Power Distribution Systems

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Smart Operation for Power Distribution Systems

Abstract

Planning the dispatch of distribution systems involves a variety of decision-making problems relating to the service crews and several equipment operations. These problems include the maintenance and repair of a service, through the routing, scheduling and assignment of vehicles and service orders. Also, in addition to the traditional offline dispatch, several technological advances have led to a renewed interest in online dispatch problems. This increases the opportunities for more optimized dispatch, but also raises the complexity of the problem. With a glance toward the power grid, the electric power distribution systems are being hugely transformed toward smart power distribution systems, integrating old and new energy players. In these systems, new energy transactions will become possible, bringing challenging problems to the system operators, in order to balance supply-demand-storage with the coordination among several players, such as smart controllable loads, distributed storage systems, intermittent power generators, reconfigurable networks, communication networks, and so on. Clearly, facing those problems will require a solid mathematical foundation for the understanding and solving of the problems at hand. Therefore, in this chapter, our goal is to introduce the reader to the study of an interesting problem that one could expect to face in the operation of a smart distribution system: the dispatch problem. To this end, along this chapter, we analyze the anatomy of the dispatch problem and study two instances which may be faced in the operation of the power distribution systems: (1) the economic dispatch problem, which deals with the (economic) dispatching of power generators and (2) the service dispatch problem, which deals with the dispatching of working personnel for attending customer, maintenance and emergency orders in the distribution system.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Technology Center, Federal University of Santa Maria, Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

    M. Schmitz, C. H. Barriquello & Vinícius Jacques Garcia

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  1. M. Schmitz
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  2. C. H. Barriquello
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  1. Technology Center, Federal University of Santa Maria, Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

    Daniel Pinheiro Bernardon

  2. Technology Center, Federal University of Santa Maria, Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

    Vinícius Jacques Garcia

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Schmitz, M., Barriquello, C.H., Garcia, V.J. (2018). The Dispatch Problems in Power Distribution Systems. In: Bernardon, D., Garcia, V. (eds) Smart Operation for Power Distribution Systems. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93922-3_7

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