Adapted ant colony optimization for efficient reconfiguration of balanced and unbalanced distribution systems for loss minimization

This paper presents an efficient method for the reconfiguration of radial distribution systems for minimization of real power loss using adapted ant colony optimization. The conventional ant colony optimization is adapted by the graph theory to always create feasible radial topologies during the whole evolutionary process. This avoids tedious mesh check and hence reduces the computational burden. The initial population is created randomly and a heuristic spark is introduced to enhance the pace of the search process. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated on balanced and unbalanced test distribution systems. The simulation results show that the proposed method is efficient and promising for reconfiguration problem of radial distribution systems. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.