Reconfiguration of Distribution Network Based on Improved Plant Growth Simulation Algorithm

A new distribution network reconfiguration method employing plant growth simulation algorithm as optimal means has been presented. The algorithm handles the objective function and constraints separately, and adopts directional search mechanism. It can avoid falling into local optimal point, which may appear in precious bionics random algorithms due to uncertainness of some parameters and/or without guiding search direction. Moreover, according to the features of distribution network, an improved expressing scheme, using switch as variables is also developed, which is simple and dramatically reduces the dimension of variable and improves the efficiency of calculation. At the same time, the functioning method of the switch is described in four states which can effectively decreases the search scope in optimizing process. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, comparative studies are conducted on IEEE69 bus sample systems with rather encouraging results.