A Population-Membrane-System-Inspired Evolutionary Algorithm for Distribution Network Reconfiguration

This paper proposes a Populationmembrane-system-inspired evolutionary algorithm (PMSIEA), which is designed by using a population P system and a Quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithm (QIEA). PMSIEA uses the population P system with three cells to organize three variants of QIEAs, where communications between cells are performed at the level of genes, instead of the level of individuals reported in the existing membrane algorithms. This work provides a useful framework for synthesizing different algorithms at macro level and exchanging genic information at micro scale. Experimental results conduced on knapsack problems show that PMSIEA is superior to four representative QIEAs and our previous work with respect to the quality of solutions and the elapsed time. We also use PMSIEA to solve the optimal distribution system reconfiguration problem in power systems for minimizing the power loss.