Ant Colony Optimization Method Applied to Distribution Network Reconfiguration

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is a meta-heuristic iterative algorithm used to solve different combinatorial optimization problems. In this method, a number of artificial ants build solutions for an optimization problem and exchange information on their quality through a communication scheme that is similar to the one adopted by real ants. In this paper, Ant Colony Optimization is used to solve reconfiguration of a benchmark distribution system consisting of 14 buses for loss minimization. Solving this problem is a formidable task even for a simple distribution network as the number of possible switching options that are to be considered is numerous. The results obtained using any meta-heuristic method strongly depends on the control parameter values chosen. Here an attempt is made to study this aspect in detail with respect to Ant Colony Optimization algorithm applied for distribution network reconfiguration.