A NEW MUTATION STRATEGY FOR THE DIFFERENTIAL EVOLUTION METAHEURISTIC APPLIED TO THE RECONFIGURATION OF POWER DISTRIBUTION NETWORKS

Resumo

This work presents a comparative evaluation between two mutation variants of the Differential Evolution (DE) metaheuristic and a newly proposed strategy, applied to the problem of Distribution Network Reconfiguration (DNR). Reconfiguration is employed to make network operation more efficient and economical. The objective is to identify which of these approaches provides better performance in terms of number of iterations, average convergence time, and quality of the obtained solutions, under the same initial assumptions. For the analyses, the 33-, 70-, and 84-bus systems, widely adopted in the literature, were used along with a framework developed to ensure a fair comparison. The results show that the proposed strategy achieves superior performance, especially in more complex distribution networks.