Modified particle swarm optimization for solving distribution feeder reconfiguration problem with distributed generation

An ordinal optimization (OO) technique in conjunction with a particle swarm optimization (PSO) method is presented in this paper to solve a feeder reconfiguration problem that aims to maximize distributed generation (DG) penetration in an existing distribution network. A set of good enough solutions obtained from crude models used in OO approach are taken as the initial population of particles for PSO solution in order to speed up solution efficiency in subsequent iterations. A simplified Taipower distribution network is used in this study to test the performance of the proposed method. Test results indicate that the proposed method can be used to obtain a good solution for maximizing DG integration in the distribution network.