A tabu search approach to distribution network reconfiguration for loss reduction

Distribution network reconfiguration for loss minimization is a complex, large-scale combinatorial optimization problem. A new efficient and robust algorithm for the reconfiguration of distribution networks in order to reduce the power energy losses under normal operating conditions is presented in this article. The developed algorithm is based on a tabu search (TS) approach, which is a recent member in the family of modern heuristic methods. Tabu search is used for efficiently obtaining the near-optimal solutions of combinatorial optimization problems, which makes it suitable to solve the problem of distribution network reconfiguration. The components of proposed TS-based method and effective schemes, which aim at speeding up the solution methodology, are also presented. To demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of the proposed method, three test systems with different sizes are studied. The numerical results reveal that the proposed method is promising.