FEEDER RECONFIGURATION AND CAPACITOR PLACEMENT IN DISTRIBUTION SYSTEMS: AN APPROACH FOR SIMULTANEOUS SOLUTION USING A GENETIC ALGORITHM

Abstract

This paper presents an effective approach to simultaneous solution of capacitor placement and feeder reconfiguration for power-energy loss cost minimization and voltage profile enhancement in radial distribution systems. Considering a time variation load, an optimization method using a genetic algorithm is proposed to determine the optimal location and size of fixed and switchable capacitors, as well as the open/closed states of the sectionalizing and tie switches. Reduction of overall power and energy losses and capacitor costs are involved in problem formulation. The proposed approach is demonstrated using example systems from the literature and results show that taken into account both capacitor placement and feeder reconfiguration simultaneously can generate around 10% more energy and peak loss reduction than considering them separately. Simulations results are presented for a 16 bus IEEE system and for a 733 bus practical distribution network.