Optimal energy restoration for general distribution systems by genetic algorithms

Several approaches have been developed to restore energy for an outage zone in distribution systems, after a fault in the network has been identified and isolated. To achieve the energy restoration, those approaches perform the restoration only for circuits with specific features; additionally, they are not able to deal with large outage zones. This paper develops a method using genetic algorithms (GA) for energy restoration. The algorithm overcomes the combinatorial characteristic and copes with nonlinear and noncontinuous objective function inherent to this kind of problem. A new representation for distribution systems is also proposed. The efficiency of the proposed approach is shown using a fairly complex distribution system.