Distribution network reconfiguration in smart grid system using modified particle swarm optimization

One of the major characteristic of a smart protection system in Smart grid is to automatically reconfigure the network for operational conditions improvement or during emergency situations avoiding outage on one hand and ensuring power system reliability the other hand. This paper proposes a modified form of particle swarm optimization to identify the optimal configuration of distribution network effectively. The difference between the Modified Particle Swarm Optimization algorithms (MPSO) and the typical one is the filtered random selective search space for initial position, which is proposed to accelerate the algorithm for reaching the optimum solution. The main objective function is to minimize the power losses as it represents high waste of operational cost. The suggested method is tested on a 33 IEEE network using IPSA software. Results are compared to studies using other forms of swarm optimization algorithms such as the typical PSO and Binary PSO. 29% of losses reduction has been achieved during a less computational time.