Implementation and Validation of Different Reconfiguration Strategies Between HSA and PSO for Loss Reduction

Abstract: In electric distribution system, the problem of finding the optimal configuration of radial network may be classified as the Travelling Salesman Problem. When a medium voltage system (20 kV) has a number of connected feeders whose circuit breakers (CBs) can become open or closed, a combinatorial number of possible system configurations created by switching CBs become very large. In order to determine the minimum loss configuration of medium voltage system, a new computation algorithm is proposed. Harmony Search Algorithm (HSA) is proposed to solve the network re-configuration problem to get optimal switching combination in the network. The HSA is a recently developed algorithm which is conceptualized using the musical process of searching for a perfect state of harmony. It uses a stochastic random search instead of a gradient search which eliminates the need for derivative information. Simulations are carried out on 33-bus radial network of IEEE test system to validate the proposed algorithm. The results are compared with PSO (Particle Swarm Optimization) as a popular approaches available in the literature. It is observed that the proposed method performed well compared to the PSO in terms of the quality of solutions.

Keywords: TSP, HSA, optimal switching, loss reduction, electric distribution system, stochastic, PSO