This paper presents an application of the parallel Adaptive Evolutionary Algorithm (AEA) to search an optimal solution of the service restoration in electric power distribution systems, which is a discrete optimization problem. The main objective of service restoration is, when a fault or overload occurs, to restore as much load as possible by transferring the de-energized load in the out of service area via network reconfiguration to the appropriate adjacent feeders at minimum operational cost without violating operating constraints. This problem has many constraints and it is very difficult to find the optimal solution because of its numerous local minima. In this investigation, a parallel AEA was developed for the service restoration of the distribution systems. In parallel AEA, a genetic algorithm (GA) and an evolution strategy (ES) in an adaptive manner are used in order to combine the merits of two different evolutionary algorithms: the global search capability of the GA and the local search capability of the ES. In the reproduction procedure, proportions of the population by GA and ES are adaptively modulated according to the fitness. After AEA operations, the best solutions of AEA processors are transferred to the neighboring processors. For parallel computing, a PC cluster system consisting of 8 PCs was developed. Each PC employs the 2 GHz Pentium IV CPU and is connected with others through switch based fast Ethernet. To show the validity of the proposed method, the developed algorithm has been tested with a practical distribution system in Korea. From the simulation results, the proposed method found the optimal service restoration strategy. The obtained results were the same as that of the explicit exhaustive search method. Also, it is found that the proposed algorithm is efficient and robust for service restoration of distribution systems in terms of solution quality, speedup, efficiency, and computation time.