Feeder reconfiguration and capacitor allocation in the presence of non-linear loads using new P-PSO algorithm

This study proposes a new particle swarm optimisation algorithm for combined problem of capacitor placement and network reconfiguration simultaneously in the presence of non-linear loads. Here, the minimising cost of real power losses and capacitor installation and also improving the power quality criteria have been pursued as the goals of an optimisation problem. In the proposed method, to achieve better control on the algorithm's exploration and exploitation capabilities, particles velocity will be dependent upon both particle's fitness and time. Perturbation module is adopted to perform perturbation on some particles and provide extra diversity to jump out from local optima and avoid premature convergence. The proposed model is implemented on two typical networks including 33-bus IEEE standard well-known test system and a 77-bus radial distribution network of Sirjan, Iran. Through showing numerical results, the performance of the presented method will be discussed in comparison to previously proposed ones. The numeric comparison also indicates that simultaneously capacitor placement and network reconfiguration lead to far better results than they are considered non-simultaneously. Furthermore, in regard to harmonic distortion, as a term of a multi-objective function, it also improves the power quality of the network during the reconfiguration and capacitor placement procedures.