Network Reconfiguration in Electric Power Distribution Networks: A Review

The deployment of distributed energy resources (DER) in electric power distribution networks (DN) yields significant spatiotemporal power flows and presents substantial operational challenges. Network reconfiguration (NR), via strategic control of switch states, has emerged as an effective tool to address issues such as power outages, voltage violations, increased losses, power quality issues, and a rise in associated operating costs. Based on the literature, NR enables up to 30% loss reduction, 5-15% improvement in voltage profiles, and significant gains in reliability and outage mitigation. This paper presents an application-focused review of NR strategies for operational planning in active DNs. It categorizes state-of-the-art literature based on applications, such as reliability enhancement, voltage regulation, power quality improvement, and cost reduction. This study evaluates the optimization formulations and solution techniques, – heuristic, metaheuristic, and mathematical programming approaches – by covering their strengths and limitations in NR problems. It also explores emerging directions involving machine and reinforcement learning, and quantum-inspired algorithms. The goal is to provide a clear road map for researchers and practitioners aiming to implement NR in modern electric power distribution networks.