SUMMARY
Distribution system reconfiguration is performed during normal or emergency operations by changing the status of switches. System reconfiguration can be used for system loss reduction or voltage profile improvement during normal operations. For emergency operations, de‐energized loads can be transferred to adjacent energized feeders through system reconfiguration. Several objectives, for example, system real power loss reduction and transformer load balancing improvement, are considered simultaneously during system reconfiguration. In order to consider the objectives simultaneously, weighted sum method was commonly used. Only one solution may be obtained when weighted sum method was applied. However, several compromise solutions were preferred for the distribution system operators. Multi‐objective approach was one of the methods that can be used to provide multiple compromise solutions. In this paper, the fitness function in non‐dominated sorting genetic algorithm and the reproduction procedure in evolutionary programming were integrated. The proposed non‐dominated sorting evolutionary programming was applied to the multi‐objective problems in distribution systems in order to provide system operators with different compromise solutions. The results of this study indicated that the proposed non‐dominated sorting evolutionary programming was capable of identifying better solutions than that of non‐dominated sorting genetic algorithm for distribution system reconfiguration problems. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.