A mutated salp swarm algorithm for optimum allocation of active and reactive power sources in radial distribution systems

The purpose of this paper is to get shunt capacitors (SCs) and distributed generations (DGs) such as photovoltaic (PV) allocated to compensate the reactive power of the distribution systems and enhance the system performance. Finding the optimal sizing and siting of mentioned devices needs a powerful optimization tool. Hence, this paper presents an efficient, simple, and accurate optimization algorithm based on modifying the standard version of salp swarm algorithm (SSA) named mutated salp swarm algorithm (MSSA). In other words, a mutation mechanism is applied on the standard version of SSA to escape from the local minima and enhancing the diversity in population. To validate the efficiency of proposed optimization algorithm, it is firstly applied on optimizing some well-known benchmark functions. Then, it is handled to cope with allocating SCs as the reactive source and PVs as the active power source in the distribution systems. The proposed method is accomplished on the IEEE 33 and 69-nod distribution systems and the obtained results are compared with some published papers. The results illustrate that MSSA has better performance for planning the distribution systems compared with existing methods. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.