A new heuristic approach for optimal reconfiguration of distribution systems for improvement of power delivery efficiency through loss reduction

Power loss reduction is one of the main targets in power industry and so in this paper, the problem of finding the optimal configuration of a radial distribution system for loss reduction is considered. This paper presents a new method for optimal reconfiguration of radial distribution systems (RDS). Optimal reconfiguration involves selection of the best set of branches to be opened, one each from each loop, which is based on the calculation of voltage at the buses, real and reactive power flowing through lines, real power losses and voltage deviation, using distribution load flow (DLF) program such that the resulting RDS has the desired performance. The developed load flow program is integrated with known heuristic techniques in a new heuristic search methodology for deter-mining the minimum loss configuration of a radial distribution system. The technique consists of two parts; one is to determine the best switching combinations in all loops with minimum computational effort while the other is a power loss and voltage profile calculation of the best switching combination found in part one by load flows. The solutions get converged very early on; therefore execution time is very small. In this paper an implementation of the algorithm presented by [16] is applied To demonstrate the validity of the proposed algorithm, computer simulations are carried out on a IEEE 33-bus system. The results show that the performance of the proposed method is better than that of the other methods.