Reconfiguration and capacitor placement in radial distribution systems for loss reduction and reliability enhancement

This paper applies different approaches to solve network reconfiguration and capacitor placement/setting problem. First, reconfiguration and capacitor placement is solved for power loss minimization. Second, medium and long-term planning perspective is considered for the problem which takes into account reliability cost in addition to energy losses cost. A heuristic algorithm is used in this study for reliability evaluation considering protection schemes and isolation points in the distribution network. The problems are solved by Harmony Search Algorithm, and it is shown that its performance is much more satisfactory than several other metaheuristic algorithms to solve reconfiguration and capacitor placement for two case studies. Different approaches of the problem are considered in the planning stage, which shows that the comprehensive objective function including losses cost and reliability cost gives the optimum answer, otherwise extra cost will be imposed. Also, the advantage of using load duration curves and increasing the amount of computations is studied in this paper.