Saeedeh Ahmadi - Faculty of Engineering and TechnologyImam Khomeini International UniversityQazvin, Iran
Mostafa Sedighizadeh - Faculty of Engineering and TechnologyImam Khomeini International UniversityQazvin, Iran
Shirzad Abdi - ImenSazan Consultant EngineersTehran, Iran

Distribution systems reconfiguration which is donewith a series of switching operations is a simple and low-costmethod which without adding additional equipment in networkoptimizes the utilization of distribution systems. This paperpresents an efficient hybrid Big Bang-Big Crunch optimization(HBB-BC) algorithm for distribution system reconfiguration toreduce the power loss. During the reconfiguration, constraintslike being radial, avoiding load isolation as well asvoltage/current limitations must be taken into consideration.Taking these constraints into account makes reconfiguration anoptimization problem. The HBB-BC algorithm is an effective andpowerful method that has high accuracy and convergence speedas well as its implementation is easy. This algorithm using theParticle Swarm Optimization (PSO) capacities improves thecapability of the Big Bang-Big Crunch (BB-BC) algorithm forbetter exploration. In addition, the HBB-BC uses a mutationoperator after position updating to avoid local optimum and toexplore new search areas. The effectiveness of the proposedalgorithm is demonstrated on two test distribution systems. Thesimulation results are compared with the solutions obtained byother approaches.

big bang-big crunch; particle swarm optimization;distribution system reconfiguration; loss reduction, mutation