A Swarm Approach for Improving Voltage Profiles and Reduce Power Loss on Electrical Distribution Networks

As a mean to provide reactive power compensation to radial distribution networks, capacitor banks are commonly installed within these electrical distribution systems. When properly allocated, capacitor banks provide several benefits, including an improvement on the feeder’s voltage profile and significant reductions on power loss, which, in turn, leads to important amounts of energy savings and cost reductions. This formulation is known in the literature as optimal capacitor placement (OCP) problem. From an optimization perspective, OCP is considered remarkably complex due to its high multi-modality, discontinuity, and non-linearity. In this paper, the swarm optimization algorithm known as locust search (LS) is proposed for solving the OCP problem. The proposed approach has been tested by considering several IEEE’s radial distribution test systems, and its performance has also been compared against that of other techniques currently reported on the literature to solve the OCP problem. Our experimental results suggest that the proposed LS-based method is able to competitively solve the OCP problem in terms of accuracy and robustness.