Comparative study of modern heuristic algorithms to service restoration in distribution systems

This paper presents a comparative study for four modern heuristic algorithms (MHAs) to service restoration in distribution systems: reactive tabu search, tabu search, parallel simulated annealing, and genetic algorithm. Since service restoration is an emergency control in distribution control centers to restore out-of-service areas as soon as possible, it requires fast computation and high quality solutions for customers' satisfaction. The problem can be formulated as a combinatorial optimization problem to divide the out-of-service area to each power source. The effectiveness of the MHAs is compared against each other on typical service restoration problems.