A novel metaheuristic method based on artificial ecosystem-based optimization for optimization of network reconfiguration to reduce power loss.

Power loss reduction is a very important problem in operating the distribution network. This paper presents a method relied on artificial ecosystem-based optimization (AEO) for the network reconfiguration (NR) problem. The considered goal of the NR problem is to reduce power loss. The performance of the proposed AEO method is evaluated on the 14-node, 69-node and 136-node distribution networks. In addition, the NR approach relied on cuckoo search algorithm (CSA) is also implemented to compare with the proposed AEO method. The statistics result comparisons between AEO and CSA demonstrate that AEO outperforms CSA method with the higher success rate and better quality of the obtained solution in finding the optimal network configuration. In addition, AEO is also better than some previous approaches in the literature in term of the obtained network configuration. Consequently, AEO method is a very effective approach for the NR problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]