Distribution Systems Reconfiguration using a modified particle swarm optimization algorithm

This paper presents the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm for solving the optimal distribution system reconfiguration problem for power loss minimization. The PSO is a relatively new and powerful intelligence evolution algorithm for solving optimization problems. It is a population-based approach. The PSO is originally inspired from the social behavior of bird flocks and fish schools. The proposed PSO algorithm in this paper is introduced with some modifications such as using an inertia weight that decreases linearly during the simulation. This setting allows the PSO to explore a large area at the start of the simulation. Also, a modification in the number of iterations and the population size is presented. Comparative studies are conducted on two test distribution systems to verify the effectiveness of the proposed PSO algorithm. The obtained results are compared with those obtained using other techniques in previous work to evaluate the performance. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.