Sectionalizing switches can be employed for service reliability enhancement in primary distribution systems. In this paper three models are proposed for optimal allocation of sectionalizers. In the first model, the aim is to minimize the outage, maintenance and investments costs with respect to restriction in capital budget. In the second model, the aim is to meet the minimum outage cost using maximum capital resource available while in the third one, the aim is to meet the certain level of reliability using minimum number of switches. All models are solved using genetic algorithm (GA) as the optimization tool. The performance of the proposed approaches are assessed and appreciated by various case studies on urban distribution system connected to bus 2 of the RBTS and a real distribution system from Iran.
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