Radial network reconfiguration method in distribution system using mutation Particle Swarm Optimization

We present a new particle swarm optimization (PSO) for 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 introduced 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 a test system with 37 nodes and 63 branches. The proposed method improves the maximum arrival number at the optimal solution from 8 to 17 compared to PSO without mutation in twenty trials. This number of DDM-PSO is also more than that of GA, 10. These results show the effectiveness of our method.