Artificial Bee Colony algorithm for optimal placement and sizing of distributed generation

In electric power networks, to satisfy the increasing demand, various methods have been improved and implemented. Distributed generation (DG) is one of these methods which has many advantages as providing loss reduction, improving voltage profile, and increasing reliability. Besides renewable energy sources like solar cells, wind turbines, fuel cells, and small hydro turbines can be used as a DG-unit. In this paper, DG-unit placement and sizing process is performed with Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm. ABC algorithm is a meta-heuristic approach inspired by the intelligent foraging behavior of honey bee swarms. 33, 69, 229 bus radial test systems are used in order to show the performance of ABC algorithm in solving nonlinear optimization problems. The results show that ABC algorithm can successfully determines optimal place and size of DG-unit.