Distribution Network Reconfiguration Using an Approximate Optimization Approach

Power network reconfiguration is an important process in the improvement of operating conditions of a power system and in planning studies, service restoration and distribution automation when remote-controlled switches are employed. This paper presents the use of a quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithm to solve the distribution network reconfiguration problem. The quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithm is the combination product of quantum computing and evolutionary computation and is suitable for a class of integer programming problems such as the distribution network reconfiguration problem. After the analysis and formulation of the distribution network reconfiguration problem, the effectiveness and feasibility of the introduced method is verified by a large number of experiments.