LAUSR

Abstract Power quality problems are one of the main concerns of both consumers and distribution system operators. The request for higher power quality levels by the sensitive devices, while the indices are negatively affected by the modern loads and distributed generation units, has brought the grid operators to a critical challenge. On the other hand, the distribution system reconfiguration which was primarily proposed for loss minimization is newly regarded as an effective solution for many power quality problems in the grids. Accordingly, new reconfiguration solution strategies for harmonic minimization are proposed by researchers in newly-published papers. In this paper, three different heuristic strategies are proposed for reconfiguration problem which can provide Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) minimization with the lowest calculation burden. The high speed and accuracy provided by these strategies make them applicable in real-world online applications. In order to examine the performance of the proposed methods, they are applied to different sample distribution systems and the results are compared to the solutions provided by meta-heuristic methods. According to the results, the effective harmonic reduction using the proposed methods is provided with much lower calculation burden comparing to the meta-heuristic solution strategies.