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

This paper investigates the applicability of the following four different modern heuristic algorithms (MHAs) in the service restoration problem: genetic algorithm; parallel simulated annealing; tabu search; and reactive tabu search. A problem-dependent heuristic method is presented for representing the state variable and generating initial sub-optimal states in a solution space. The feasibility of the algorithms for service restoration is compared and demonstrated on typical distribution networks with promising results.