Optimal placement and sizing of voltage controlled distributed generators in unbalanced distribution networks using supervised firefly algorithm

•This paper presents a supervised firefly optimization algorithm.•The proposed algorithm is used for finding the optimal location and capacity of dispatchable DGs.•The proposed algorithm tested on the 69-bus feeder, the IEEE 37-node feeder, and the IEEE 123 nodes feeder.•The results obtained show the effectiveness and speed of convergence of the proposed method.

This paper presents an efficient and fast converging optimization algorithm based on a modification of the traditional firefly method for optimal sizing and siting of voltage controlled distributed generators in balanced/unbalanced distribution systems. The proposed algorithm modifies the traditional firefly method to be able to deal with the practically constrained optimization problems by proposing formulas for tuning the algorithm parameters and updating equations. The proposed algorithm is implemented in MATLAB environment and tested on the 69-bus feeder system, the IEEE 37 nodes feeder and the IEEE 123-nodes feeder in order to minimize the system power loss via robustly detection of the optimal location and size of the distributed generators without violating the system constraints. Validation of the proposed method is done by comparing the obtained results with published results obtained from other competing methods.