Optimal Conductor Size Selection in Radial Power Distribution Systems Using Evolutionary Strategies

This paper presents the application of a heuristic method, called evolutionary strategy (ES), to select optimal size of feeders in radial power distribution systems. ES incorporates biologically inspired structures and operators such as recombination, mutation and fitness based selection. ES prove to be successful when compared with other iterative methods on most problems. In this paper, the posed optimization problem consists in select a conductor type for each feeder of radial power distribution systems. The optimization procedure is subject to some technical constraints, which are the Kirchhoff's current law constraints for all the nodes, the capacity constraints for the feeders and substations, and the voltage drop constraints. As a case study, the proposed method is applied to radial power distribution systems with satisfactory results