Discrete evolutionary programming to solve network reconfiguration problem

This paper proposes a new discrete approach to solve network reconfiguration of power system. Like other problems of optimization, network reconfiguration is different. Here the positions of tie switches represent integer numbers, thus the Gaussian formulation and rounding off the number, in this case is not very useful. Evolutionary Programming (EP) based discrete optimization technique is proposed to find out the optimum switch(s) combination. Minimization of power losses is considered as a fitness function. The proposed technique is tested on standard 33-bus and 69-bus radial distribution network, having 5-tie switches. The result shows that the proposed technique achieve better fitness function in less computation time and less number of iterations.