Using distributed intelligence and wireless communication to control and coordinate multiple capacitor banks

Switched shunt capacitor banks are commonly used in distribution networks to reduce the system losses and support the voltage. In this paper, distributed processing units equipped with wireless communication transceivers are installed on different buses (nodes) of distribution system, and are used to control and coordinate multiple capacitor banks in order to maximize the distribution system loss reduction. Real-time information from the smart meters, e.g. measured active and reactive load powers, are utilized by the distributed processing units to perform real-time distributed load flow analysis. The resulting voltage profile and current flow in each branch are used to iteratively compute the switched capacitor banks states that maximize the system loss reduction. The Network Simulator NS-3 is used to co-simulate the proposed capacitor banks control scheme along with the wireless communication network. The distributed load flow analysis and the the proposed control scheme are implemented as C++ applications within the network simulator NS-3, and a WiMAX wireless communication network is used in the co-simulation. The percentile rank of the computed capacitor banks state, which is obtained from NS-3 co-simulation, is used to compare the performance of the proposed control and coordination algorithm to the optimal state which obtained from GNU-Octave exhaustive search.