Application of particle swarm optimization for distribution feeder reconfiguration considering distributed generators

In many countries the power systems are going to move toward creating a competitive structure for selling and buying electrical energy. These changes and the numerous advantages of the distributed generation units (DGs) in term of their technology enhancement and economical considerations have created more incentives to use these kinds of generators than before. Therefore, it is necessary to study the impact of DGs on the power systems, especially on the distribution networks. The distribution feeder reconfiguration (DFR) is one of the most important control schemes in the distribution networks, which can be affected by DGs. This paper presents a new approach to DFR at the distribution networks considering DGs. The main objective of the DFR is to minimize the deviation of the bus voltage, the number of switching operations and the total cost of the active power generated by DGs and distribution companies. Since the DFR is a nonlinear optimization problem, we apply the particle swarm optimization (PSO) approach to solve it. The feasibility of the proposed approach is demonstrated and compared with other evolutionary methods such as genetic algorithm (GA), Tabu search (TS) and differential evolution (DE) over a realistic distribution test system.