POWER LOSS MINIMIZATION BY OPTIMAL PLACEMENT OF DISTRIBUTED GENERATION CONSIDERING THE DISTRIBUTION NETWORK CONFIGURATION BASED ON ARTIFICIAL ECOSYSTEM OPTIMIZATION

Power loss in the Distribution System (DS) is often higher than that of other parts of the power system because of its low voltage level. Therefore, reducing losses is always an important task in de-sign and operation of the DS. This paper aims to apply a new approach based on Artificial Ecosystem Optimization (AEO) for the Distributed Generation Placement (DGP) and combination of DGP and net-work REConfiguration (DGP-REC) problems to reduce power loss of the DS to satisfy the technical constraints including power balance, radial topology, voltage and current bounds, and DG capacity limit. The AEO is a recent algorithm that has no special control parame-ters, inspired from the behaviours of living organisms in the ecosystem including production, consumption, and decomposition. The efficiency of the AEO is eval-uated on two test systems including the 33 -node and 119 -node systems. The numerical results validated on the 33 -node and 119 -node systems show that DGP-REC is a more effective solution for reducing power loss com-pared to the DGP solution. In addition, evaluation re-sults on small and large systems also indicate that AEO is an effective approach for the DGP and DGP-REC problems.