Abstract
In distribution networks switching devices play critical role in energy restoration and improving reliability indices. This paper presents a novel objective function to optimally allocate switches in electric power distribution systems. Identifying the optimized location of the switches is a nonlinear programming problem (NLP). In the proposed objective function a new auxiliary function is used to simplify the calculation of the objective function. The output of the auxiliary function is binary. The genetic algorithm (GA) optimization method is used to solve this optimization problem. The proposed method is applied to a real distribution network and the results reveal that the method is successful.