THE EDGE-SET ENCODING IN EVOLUTIONARY ALGORITHMS FOR NETWORK RECONFIGURATION PROBLEMS IN POWER DISTRIBUTION SYSTEMS

摘要

In this paper we propose representing solutions in evolutionary algorithms for power distribution network reconfiguration problems using the edge-set encoding technique, and we describe recombination and mutation operators for this representation. We demonstrate the usefulness of this encoding technique in a genetic algorithm designed to deal with the problem of network reconfiguration for loss reduction. The algorithm was tested on a real power distribution network and the results were compared with the results from other heuristic methods. We concluded that the edge-set encoding and its genetic operators in evolutionary algorithms for power distribution network reconfiguration offer strong locality and heritability, and computational efficiency.