| Unbalanced electrical loads on feeders of power electrical systems can cause serious problems, including power losses, significantly lower power quality, damaging of electrical equipment, and tripping of protective devices. Nevertheless, the problem of balancing such systems ---which essentially is equivalent to the problem of three-way integer partitioning--- has proven to be NP-complete. Against this background, in this article, an algorithm based on the powerful, declarative framework of Answer Set Programming (ASP) is provided, that efficiently attacks practical instances of the phase-balancing problem. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt of approaching this significant engineering problem by means of the ASP paradigm. The whole study indicates that the examined problem is of great interest from an algorithmic viewpoint, as well as an engineering application that highlights ASP's modelling methodology. |
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