Due to the serious consequences of system outages on customers and utilities, restoration of the power supply to the healthy out-of-service loads is of profound importance. After faults have been located and isolated, restoration plans are applied in order to maximize the re-energized loads with minimum number of switching operations. The consequences of service interruption depend on the number of affected customers, customer load type and size, time of occurrence, frequency of outages, and the outage duration period. In this work, all these factors have been considered in the restoration process. The constraints involved include voltage limits, line current limits, and radial topology. In addition, an improved encoding which codes the control variables depending on different restoration circumstances is presented. It greatly reduces the number of control variables, filters out a large number of infeasible solutions and improves the algorithm efficiency. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.