Radial Network Reconfiguration Method in Distribution System using Mutation Particle Swarm Optimization

Abstract

We present a new Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) for the optimal radial network reconfiguration. Network reconfiguration is a combinatorial problem. The combination of search space increases exponentially with the number of switches. Fixed loop coding structure is used to reduce the number of combinations. The feature of this method is to introduce mutation operation for discrete decimal problem to PSO. This method, discrete decimal PSO with mutation (DDM-PSO), is applied to both a reconfiguration problem with current constraint and a realistic loss minimization problem. For the former problem, test system with 37 nodes and 63 branches, the proposed method improves the maximum arrival number at the optimal solution from 11 to 18 compared to PSO without mutation in twenty trials. This number of DDM-PSO is also more than that of GA, 11. For the other problem, 112 branches and 102 nodes network, the average losses of the DDM-PSO generated network are less than those of the PSO without mutation by 2.3%. And the proposed method improves the maximum arrival number at the optimal solution from 2 to 17 compared to PSO without mutation in twenty trials. These results show effectiveness of the developed method.