AN EFFICIENT GREEDY APPROACH FOR MINIMUM LOSS RECONFIGURATION OF DISTRIBUTION NETWORKS

This paper proposes a two-stage heuristic procedure, based on a greedy approach, for the minimum loss reconfiguration of MV distribution net works. The first stage of the procedure is based on a minimum flow rul e and consists in the progressive opening of all switchgears which are initially assumed closed, in order to convert the meshed network into a completely radial network. From the radial network thus created, on e then proceeds to search for further improvements minimizing the loss es, applying a single branch exchange technique, which in turn is comp osed of two procedures: one is based again on the minimum flow rule wh ereas the other is based on a load transfer derived from that proposed by Civanlar et al. The entire procedure has been implemented in a sof tware package which has been used to assess its efficiency. To this en d, all examples of the application of the various methods found in the existing literature for which data were available have been reconside red. The analysis of the results of this comparison has demonstrated t he efficiency of the proposed procedure which at no time produced conf igurations with losses greater than those of the corresponding configu rations arrived at with other methodologies.