Feasible method for making controlled intentional islanding of microgrids based on the modified shuffled frog leap algorithm

•In this paper, a heuristic method is proposed for the intentional islanding of microgrids.•Practical factors such as load controllability, load priority are considered for load shedding.•Practical constraints such as bus voltage and line capacity constraints are considered.•To select optimized nodes, a powerful algorithm is used.•Time and memory considerations are considered in the proposed method. Intentional islanding is a feasible solution to improve the reliability of the smart distribution system with distributed generations (DGs) when the electrical connections between the smart distribution system and upstream network are lost. In this paper, a heuristic method is proposed for the intentional islanding of microgrids. In this method, some practical and important factors such as reduction of problem solution space; load controllability; load priority; bus voltage; line capacity constraints; and the ability to construct larger islands by the combination of islands are taken into account. The proposed method is a two-stage method. In the first stage, the intentional islanding problem is relaxed and in the second stage, the feasibility of the solution is verified. In the first stage, the intentional islanding problem is assumed as a series of tree knapsack problems (TKPs) and solved by the modified shuffled frog leap algorithm (SFLA). In the second stage, the power flow calculation is carried out to check the feasibility of the islands and essential modifications are provided. The proposed method is applied to IEEE 69-bus test system with 6 DGs. The results are compared with other methods and the effects of different methods on the system reliability indices are discussed. These comparisons indicate that the proposed method is feasible and valid.