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

In this paper we propose representing solu- tions in evolutionary algorithms for power distribution network reconfiguration problems using the edge-set en- coding technique, and we describe recombination and mutation operators for this representation. We demon- strate 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 meth- ods. We concluded that the edge-set encoding and its ge- netic operators in evolutionary algorithms for power dis- tribution network reconfiguration offer strong locality and heritability, and computational efficiency.