Heuristic search approach to distribution system restoration

Service restoration, service reconfiguration, and other related problems are formulated and solved by heuristic search, which is a search strategy (e.g. depth-first search) armed with practical rules (e.g. based on operator experience) to guide the search. The method is based on operator procedures and usually generates the same solutions as operators would do. However, it is also possible to investigate alternatives that normally would not be considered by system operators, which can be very helpful under certain critical operating conditions. Moreover, the proposed framework makes it possible to investigate the effect of practical rules on the optimality of the final solution and so can be a useful tool in designing new algorithms. Test results are presented, and an illustrative example is given. The preliminary results indicate that the proposed technique is very promising