OPTIMAL RECONFIGURATION OF POWER DISTRIBUTION RADIAL NETWORK USING HYBRID META-HEURISTIC ALGORITHMS

Distribution system is a critical link between the electric power distributor and the consumers. Most of the distribution networks commonly used by the electric utility is the radial distribution network. However in this type of network, it has technical issues such as enormous power losses which affect the quality of the supply. Nowadays, the introduction of Distributed Generation (DG) units in the system help improve and support the voltage profile of the network as well as the performance of the system components through power loss mitigation. In this study network reconfiguration was done using two meta-heuristic algorithms Particle Swarm Optimization and Gravitational Search Algorithm (PSO-GSA) to enhance power quality and voltage profile in the system when simultaneously applied with the DG units. Backward/Forward Sweep Method was used in the load flow analysis and simulated using the MATLAB program. Five cases were considered in the Reconfiguration based on the contribution of DG units. The proposed method was tested using IEEE 33 bus system. Based on the results, there was a voltage profile improvement in the system from 0.9038 p.u. to 0.9594 p.u.. The integration of DG in the network also reduced power losses from 210.98 kW to 69.3963 kW. Simulated results are drawn to show the performance of each case