Recent trends of the most used metaheuristic techniques for distribution network reconfiguration

Distribution network reconfiguration (DNR) continues to be a good option to reduce technical losses in a distribution power grid. However, this non-linear combinatorial problem is not easy to assess by exact methods when solving for large distribution networks, which requires large computational times. For solving this type of problem, some researchers prefer to use metaheuristic techniques due to convergence speed, near-optimal solutions, and simple programming. Some literature reviews specialize in topics concerning the optimization of power network reconfiguration and try to cover most techniques. Nevertheless, this does not allow detailing properly the use of each technique, which is important to identify the trend. The contributions of this paper are three-fold. First, it presents the objective functions and constraints used in DNR with the most used metaheuristics. Second, it reviews the most important techniques such as particle swarm optimization (PSO), genetic algorithm (GA), simulated annealing (SA), ant colony optimization (ACO), immune algorithms (IA), and tabu search (TS). Finally, this paper presents the trend of each technique from 2011 to 2016. This paper will be useful for researchers interested in knowing the advances of recent approaches in these metaheuristics applied to DNR in order to continue developing new best algorithms and improving solutions for the topi

Distribution network reconfiguration based on parallel genetic membrane computing

As a new branch of natural computing, membrane computing (MC) has become a hot topic. Based on the combination of nested structure membrane optimization method, genetic algorithm (GA) and the distributed computing method, an efficient parallel genetic membrane computing (PGMC) is proposed. Some rules are proposed to improve the computational performance of PGMC such as communication and transportation rules between homo-core membranes and hetero-core membranes, elementary membrane crossover and division rules, mutation and dissolving rules. An application of PGMC to distribution network reconfiguration is presented. According to the features of radial distribution network operation, object generation of minimum loop and equal selection of crossover probability are used to further improve the computational efficiency. Finally, a typical example of 33-nodes net is simulated by comparing PGMC with general GA and genetic membrane computing (GMC). The results demonstrate superiority of PGMC on convergence, stability, global searching ability and so on.Xia Lei, Hongjian Wu, Yan Shi and Peng Sh