It's not just switch placement, which seems to me to be the more obvious result, but also the placement of fault indicators. The idea being that you want to minimize power restoration time. In automatically switched systems, this will be short, but you still need to locate and correct the fault. In manual systems, locating the fault and dispatching the crew are included in the fault restoration time.
As one would expect, the longer the feeder, the more fault indicators are needed. And also as one would expect, the number of these fault indicators depends on what costs you feed into the model. Clearly, the higher the power outage costs postulated, the more fault indicators will be called for.
Conference Paper A healer reinforcement approach to smart grids by improving ...