Speeding-up network reconfiguration by minimum cost maximum flow based branch exchanges

We propose a novel and efficient heuristic algorithm for solving the distribution network reconfiguration problem for loss reduction. We formulate the problem of finding incremental branch exchanges as a minimum cost maximum flow (MCMF) problem. This novel approach finds the best set of concurrent branch exchanges during each iteration of the algorithm and leads to larger loss reductions and a reduced number of iterations, hence significantly reducing the computational runtime. Experiments using distribution systems with sizes of up to 10476 buses demonstrate that the proposed technique leads to an average speed-up of 2.3x with similar or better solution quality compared to the Baran´s reconfiguration technique [32].