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 be opened or closed, the 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.