Control of voltage profile with optimal control and placement of distributed generation using the refined bacterial foraging algorithm

Abstract

This paper proposes a refined bacterial foraging algorithm (RBFA) for solving the multi-objective based optimal power dispatch with optimal placement of distributed generation (DG) to minimize the total real power loss, generation cost, the environmental emission and considering various controls and limits. The RBFA is based on the social foraging behavior of the Escherichia coli bacteria and its improved version of the basic bacterial foraging algorithm. The RBFA provides natural selection to eliminate poor foraging strategies for bacteria and to propagate other successful foraging strategies where foraging is proceeded using a position updating process, step length, search dimension and search direction with adaptation of basic foraging principles. Initially, the algorithm randomly generates the particle positions representing the size and location of DG and its proposal to solve the simultaneous optimization of the multi-objective problem. The proposed RBFA is used to determine the optimal sizes and locations of multi-DGs; the different types of DG are considered and the load flow is used to calculate the exact loss and to minimize simultaneously the economic cost and the emission of thermal units by changing the location and varying the sizes of the DG units. The test results indicate that the RBFA method can obtain better results than similar social behavior algorithm method on the IEEE30-bus system. The results are compared with and without DG units. The proposed method found the optimal location and sizing of DG units with control of the voltage profile, control of the cost of generation and control and reduction of environmental pollution and transmission losses.