Combining subpopulation tables, non-dominated solutions and Strength Pareto of MOEAs to treat service restoration problem in large-scale distribution systems

The network reconfiguration for service restoration (SR) in distribution systems is a combinatorial complex optimization problem since it involves multiple non-linear constraints and objectives. For large networks, no exact algorithm has found adequate SR plans in real-time. On the other hand, methods combining Multi-objective Evolutionary Algorithms (MOEAs) with the Node-depth encoding (NDE) have shown to be able to efficiently generate adequate SR plans for large distribution systems (with thousands of buses and switches). This paper presents a new method that combining NDE with three MOEAs: (i) NSGA-II; (iii) SPEA 2; and (iii) a MOEA based on subpopulation tables. The idea is to obtain a method that cannot-only obtain adequate SR plans for large scale distribution systems, but can also find plans for small or large networks with similar quality. The proposed method, called MEA2N-STR, explores the space of the objectives solutions better than the other MOEAs with NDE, approximating better the Pareto-optimal front. This statement has been demonstrated by several simulations with DSs ranging from 632 to 1,277 switches.