An Enhanced Differential Evolution Approach to Service Restoration of Distribution Systems

This paper proposes an enhanced differential evolution (EDE) approach to solve the problem of service restoration in distribution systems. Service restoration of distribution systems is to restore power to the blacked out but unfaulted area. Basically, it is a combinatorial optimization problem that often has a great number of candidate solutions to be evaluated by the system operators. To tackle the problem of service restoration, an EDE method which combines variable scaling DE and ant colony algorithm is employed to solve the multi-objective optimization problem. The proposed method was tested on a typical distribution system of the Taiwan Power Company (TPC) and compared with the heuristic-based fuzzy algorithm and classical DE method. Results show that the proposed method was superior to that of the existing methods in terms of convergence time and obtained restoration plans.