Application of the ant colony system for optimum switch adjustment

In this paper, a co-operative agent algorithm, the ant colony system, for optimum switch adjustments is proposed. Switch adjustment is one of the most important tools for distribution automation, since it can improve the system reliability and reduce the interruption costs without additional capital investments. The formulation of switch adjustment is a combinatorial optimization problem with nonlinear and nondifferential objective function. In this paper we choose the ant colony system to solve the problem since the ant colony system has the characteristics of positive feedback, distributed computation and the use of a constructive greedy heuristic. One of the main goals of the paper is to investigate the applicability of the ant-colony-system-based algorithm in the power system optimizations. Test results show that the proposed ant-colony-system-based algorithm can offer an optimum solution for switch adjustment.