  Increasing penetration of highly variable components such as solar generation
and electric vehicle charging loads pose significant challenges to keeping
three-phase loads balanced in modern distribution systems. Failure to maintain
balance across three phases would lead to asset deterioration and increasing
delivery losses. Motivated by the real-world needs to automate and optimize the
three-phase balancing decision making, this paper introduces a robust
look-ahead optimization framework that pursues balanced phases in the presence
of demand-side uncertainties. We show that look-ahead moving window
optimization can reduce imbalances among phases at the cost of a limited number
of phase swapping operations. Case studies quantify the improvements of the
proposed methods compared with conventional deterministic phase balancing.
Discussions on possible benefits of the proposed methods and extensions are
presented.
