Optimal placement and sizing of distributed generations and capacitors for reliability improvement and power loss minimization in distribution networks

Optimal placement and sizing of equipment in engineering systems is one of the most important and challenging practical problems. Installation of capacitors and distributed generations (DGs) in distribution systems has many benefits, such as improving the reliability as well as reducing the power loss, however, includes high investment costs. Hence, the maximum use of these benefits highly depends on choosing suitable locations for installation. In this paper, the Success Rate Group Search Algorithm (SRGSO) is used for optimal placement and sizing of DG sources and capacitor banks simultaneously in distributed systems. The used objective function includes costs of Expected interruption (ECOST), Energy Not Supplied (ENS), active power losses and DG and capacitor investment, operation and maintenance. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in finding the optimal solution, various capacitor and DG placement scenarios are simulated on the IEEE 33-bus radial distribution test system. The simulation results show that the proposed method is more effective and has higher capability for solving the problem of capacitor and DG placement, compared to previously proposed methods. Using the proposed method in this paper, the value of active power losses as well as bus voltage profile are improved more than other investigated methods.