Artificial Immune Systems applied to the reconfiguration of electrical power distribution networks for energy loss minimization

•The Artificial Immune System is proposed to reconfigure distribution networks.•The proposed approach seeks minimal energy loss through an improved algorithm.•The algorithm leads to good quality solutions with acceptable computation effort.•The proposed methodology meets the network radiality and connectivity constraints.•Different load levels from daily load curves and the voltage levels are considered. This paper presents a methodology for the reconfiguration of radial electrical distribution systems based on the bio-inspired meta-heuristic Artificial Immune System to minimize energy losses. The proposed approach can handle this combinatorial mixed integer problem of nonlinear programming. Radiality and connectivity constraints are considered as well as different load levels for planning the system operation. For this purpose, improvements to an algorithm in the literature are proposed to better accommodate the features of the problem and to improve the search process. The algorithm developed is tested in well-known distribution systems.