International Conference on Control, Automation and Systems 2008

Oct. 14-17, 2008 in COEX, Seoul, Korea

Optimal Multi-Distributed Generation Placement by Adaptive Weight

Particle Swarm Optimization
Witoon Prommee1 and Weerakorn Ongsakul2
1

School of Environment ,Resource and Development , Asian Institute Of Technology, Pathumthani , Thailand
(Tel : +66-87-188-1219; E-mail: P_kuko@hotmail.com , st104989@ait.ac.th)
2
School of Environment ,Resource and Development , Asian Institute Of Technology, Pathumthani , Thailand
(Tel : +66-81-658-5490; E-mail: ongsakul@ait.ac.th)
Abstract: This paper proposes an adaptive weight particle swarm optimization (APSO) for solving optimal distributed
generation (DG) placement. APSO has ability to control velocity of particles. The objective is to minimize the real
power loss within acceptable voltage limits. Four types of DG are considered including DG supplying real power only,
DG supplying reactive power only, DG supplying real power and consume reactive power, DG supplying real power
and reactive power, representing photovoltaic, synchronous condenser, wind turbines, and hydro power, respectively.
The test systems include 33-bus and 69-bus radial distribution systems. With a given number of DGs in each type,
APSO could find the optimal sizes and locations of multi-DG which result in less total power system loss than basic
particle swarm optimization (BPSO) and repetitive load flow. Moreover, if the number of DG increases from one to
three, the total power loss will decrease for all types.
Keywords: distributed generation (DG), adaptive weight particle swarm optimization, repetitive load flow, optimal
distributed generation placement

1. Introduction

G has more advantage than large power generation

including usefulness from other DG setting by
direct and indirect following as; firstly, DG becomes
energy back up in interruption case in generation or
main distribution system. Secondly, the investment
reduction in line connects far from a way substation.
Finally, it is the most importance for energy loss
reduction. These advantages help the government to
decrease maintenance cost of transmission and
distribution system. The cost will be reduced upon DG
location setting and suitable size of DGs. The process
of optimal placement of distributed generation for loss
reduction is considered in power system planning.
Moreover, its necessary to describe detail of
mathematic solutions to find suitable algorithm to apply
with DG setting. The final results are optimal placement
and size of DGs to minimize loss for setting a number
of DGs in distribution system data. In addition, size and
location of DGs calculations are under standard voltage
level and limited power which are good approach to
design size and location of DGs. Furthermore, the
artificial intelligent techniques are able to be applied
with the solution of the suitable location and DG size in
the distribution. The aim of this solution is to use APSO
for determining optimal DG size and right location
when the total real power loss is minimized.
The techniques of DG placement can be divided in to
two main methods as following: The first method is
traditional based such as Optimal Power Flow (OPF),
sensitive factor and repetitive load flows (reload flow).
On the other hand, the artificial intelligent (AI) in the
second method is used to apply with distributed
generation placement. Moreover, the one of the AI

methods is APSO which is focused in this paper. For

the objective function, the total real power loss is
calculated by Backward-Forward Sweep method [1].
In this paper, there are four cases of DG different
types which show real power and reactive power flow
relate with each DG types in different power systems
[1] including DGs supply real power only, DGs supply
reactive power only, DGs supply real power and
consume reactive power and DGs regulate the bus
voltage.
The organization of this paper is as follows; section 2
shows the problem formulation and constraints. Then,
the DG types and power model equations are presented
in section 3. A brief overview of BPSO and APSO
application is discussed in section 4. The algorithm of
Optimal DG placement bases on PSO in the section5.
Furthermore, simulated results of the test systems are
illustrated in section 6 and finally concluding notices
show in section 7.

2. Problem Formulation
The real power loss optimization problem is usually
written as [1]:
Minimize Ploss
The equality constrains are the non-linear power flow
equation which can be formed as follows;
n

Ploss = Aij ( Pi Pj + QiQ j ) + Bij (Qi Pj PiQ j ) (1)

i =1 j =1

where;

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A ij =

R ij cos( i j )
Vi Vj

Bij =

R ij sin( i j )
Vi Vj

Pi and Qi are net real and reactive power injection in

bus i respectively.
R ij is the line resistance between bus i and j.

Vi and i are the voltage and the angle at bus i

respectively.
Subject to

PG = PD + Ploss

(2)

Ploss denotes the real power loss in the system.

PG and PD are the generation power and the demand

Where

3.2 DGs supply reactive power only. (Type2)

In the second case, we will assume that the DG will
supply reactive power only. DG like synchronous
conditioner will provide reactive power with the
purpose of improving network condition [1]. The
synchronous condenser is a synchronous machine
running without a prime mover or a mechanical load.
By controlling the field excitation, it can be made either
generate or absorb reactive power automatically [3].
We can denote Qi in the power loss equation as
follows [1];

power in the system respectively.

Qi =

The inequality constrains are the voltage limits and DG

power limits which are as follows;

Vjmin Vj Vjmax
min
max
QDG
QDG QDG

3. DG type and power model equations

Under this DG size and placement is found with
different types of DGs. In this part, the equations of
each DG types are showed as follows;

3.1 DGs supply real power only. (Type1)

Photovoltaic uses solid state materials to produce
electricity directly from sunlight. Although the
installation costs of photovoltaic (PV) systems are
expensive, but they consume no fuel, their maintenance
costs are cheap, and their operation doesnt leave air
pollution. Hence, their environmental impacts are very
low and their lifetime costs drop dramatically when
compared to installation costs. This DG type is like
photovoltaic that produce real power only. Energy from
PV becomes direct currents in batteries. As a result, the
photovoltaic system can generate only the real
power. Pi is considered in the power loss equation as
follows;

1
Aii

(A P
ij

j =1
j i

Bij Q j )

(3)

Where

Pi = (PDGi PDi )

(A Q
ij

j =1
j i

+ Bij Pj )

(5)

Where Qi is the reactive power injection at bus i,

Qi = (QDGi QDi )

(4)

PDGi the real power injection from DG is placed

(6)

QDGi the reactive power injection from DG is

placed at bus i and QDi is the load demand at bus i
Where

3.3 DGs supply real power and consume

reactive power. (Type3)
Here, DGs are considered that the DG will supply real
power and in turn will absorb reactive power. In case of
the wind turbines, the wind turbines use induction
generators to generate electricity which, in turn,
consume reactive power to produce real power [1].
The reactive power consumed by the DG (wind
generation) in simple form can be given as in equation
(7).
2
QDGi = (0.05 + 0.04 PDGi
)

(7)

where QDGi is the reactive power injection from DG

placed at bus i and

PDGi is the real power injection

from DG placed at bus i.

With the real power loss equation can be written as
follows;
2
n n A (P

ij
DGi PDi )Pj + (1 0.04PDG)Qj
PL =
(8)
2
i=1 j=1 + Bij [(1 0.04PDGi QDi )Pj (PDGi PDi )Qj ]

Where

Where Pi is the real power injection at bus i, which is

the difference between real power generation and
demand at that node. If a DG of size PDGi is placed at
that bus, then

is placed at that bus, then

where j is the distribution bus number.

Bus voltage limits 0.90 to 0.98 per unit and 0.05MW to
5MW for DG real power limit.

Pi =

1
Aii

which is the difference between reactive power

generation and demand at that bus. If a DG of size Q DGi

min
max
PDG
PDG PDG

PDi is the load demand at bus i

at bus i and

PL denotes the total real power loss of system.

3.4 DGs regulate the bus voltage. (Type4)

In this case, we consider that DG will support bus
voltage, i.e. the voltage at the bus at which DG is
connected will always be fixed. Real power injected by
the DG will be found and required reactive power to
support the bus voltage will be found with the help of
equation (4) and equation (6)

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4. Particle Swarm Optimization

Particle group or particle swarm is a system model or a
social structure of basic creature which makes a group
to have some purpose such as food searching. It is an
important part to take the most of population in a group
that has the same activity. The group of creatures has
this relative behavior for example, bee swarm, fish
school, and bird flock.

v ik
: The current velocity of particle i at iteration k.
v ik +1 : The modified velocity of particle i.
r1 , r2 : The random numbers between 0 and 1.
s ik
: The current position of particle i at iteration k.
pbest i : The personal best of particle i.
gbest

c1 , c 2

pbest

(Typical value c1 , c 2

Bird

= 2)

Location

s ik +1 = s ik + v ik +1
(10)
k +1
Where s i : The modified current position of particle i.

Victim

gbest

4.2 Adaptive Weight Particle Swarm

Optimization (APSO)

Fig. 1. Birds food searching with PSO.

Fig. 1 shows bird flock hunter that is a bird suspect to a

particle. In victim searching, all bird groups will fly
together in the same direction and the bird leader is the
nearest food that has the shortest distance as the best
fitness and the other birds follow the leader. The particle
swarm model will be used by fitness value
consideration. The particles represent solutions of
fitness value. Moreover the important property in food
searching of birds for instance, the particles velocity of
each particle uses to set the direction of particle
movement. After that, all particles in the flock will must
be improved their direction that related with the best
fitness of particle direction. The result of this process
will help to set the most appropriate direction. This
paper advises two kinds of PSO as follows;

4.1 Basic Particle Swarm Optimization (BPSO)

BPSO or classical practical swarm optimization was
first introduced by James Kennedy and Eberhart in
1995. This PSO consists of a group (swarm) of
individuals (particles) moving in the search space, their
trajectory being determined by the fitness values found
so far. Each particle is represented by a vector s of
length n indicating the position and has a velocity vector
v used to update the current position. The velocity
vector is computed following the rules:
- Every particle tends to keep its current direction (an
inertia term)
- Every particle is attracted to the best position p it has
achieved so far (a memory term);
- Every particle is attracted to the best particle g in
population (the particle having the best fitness value)
The formulas used to update each of the individuals in
the population at iteration t+1 are [2]:
Velocity

vik+1 = vik + c1r1 (pbesti sik ) + c2 r2 (gbest sik )

Where

: The global best of the group.

: The learning factors or acceleration constants.

(9)

In 1998, Shi and Eberhart had proposed a modified PSO

which has an adaptive parameter, named inertia weight,
is introduced in order to enhance the performance of the
original version of PSO. The principle of the adaptive
PSO is described as follows. PSO starts with the random
initialization of a swarm of particles in the search space.
The ith particle is represented as s i . The best previous
position of the ith particle that gives the best fitness
value is represented as p i . The best particle among all
the particles in the population is represented as g i . The
rate of the position change for ith particle is represented
as v i (Velocity) [4]. At every iteration, the velocity
and position of each particle is updated by following the
two best values according to the following the equation
(9) and the equation (10). The role of W is considered
critical for the convergence behavior of PSO. The
parameter W is used to regulate the trade-off between
the global and local exploration abilities of the swarm. A
large inertia weight facilitates global exploration. PSO
tends to have more global search ability at the beginning
of the run while having more local search ability near
the end of the run. Given a user-specified maximum
weight ( Wmax ) and a minimum weight ( Wmin ), the
inertial weight w is updated as the decreasing function
of the iteration k [4]:
Weight

w k +1 = w k +

w min w max
K

(11)

Where, K is the pre-defined maximum number of

iterations. It has been demonstrated that 0.9 for max w
and 0.4 for min w can greatly improve the performance
of PSO.

5. PSO-Based Algorithm for Optimal DGs

Placement

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The real power loss is expressed as the fitness function

which evaluates the performance of the particles.
Control variables, such as location (bus no.) and DG
size are presented as the vector of a particles position in
equation (9).
The PSO algorithm with optimal DG placement can
be described as follows:
Step1: Input basic data. For example, 33 Bus and 69
Bus Distribution which have load data and impendent of
system.
Step2: Calculate the original loss by BackwardForward Sweep Method.
Step3: Initialize a particle population. Modified
matrix contains location and size of DGs with
population size which is set to 200. For example, Two
DG- Type1 creates a matrix which has four basic
columns.
[min- PG
max-PG min-Location max- Location]
Step4: Calculate the objective value which is the total
real power loss.
Step5: Record real power loss as the current pbest
and the minimum value as the current overall best gbest.
Step6: Update the velocity (v), particle (s) and weight
(w) follow as:
6.1 BPSO by equations (9), (10),
6.2 APSO by equations (9), (10), (11)
Step7: Check the stop criterion.
Check max generation (max iteration equates to 100)
-If the iteration doesnt not equate to 100, the process
will return to Step 4.
-If the iteration equates to 100, the process will go to
print out, after that the final gbest of particles is the
answer.
Step8: After DGs are set, calculate the loss by
Backward- Forward Sweep Method again.
After that, the results will be printed out to be
location and size of DGs which make minimized loss.
The original loss and the loss after DG setting will be
showed too.
The steps of PSO based algorithm for optimal DG
placement can be discussed as flowchart in fig 2.
In load flow algorithm [1], two interactive processes are
mainly used. They are backward sweep and forward
sweep. Firstly, Branch current is calculated. During
each backward sweep process the voltage obtained at
forward sweep is kept constant and updated branch
currents are transmitted backward along the feeder
using backward path. In the forward sweep, the values
of current from forward sweep are kept as constants and
the voltage of each node will be updated. The feeder
substation voltage is kept constant. The backward and
forward sweep will be repeated until certain stopping
criteria are met by measuring the voltage mismatch after
the completion of one round of backward and forward
sweep. Voltage in each node and current in branch will
be used to find the real and reactive power loss of the
distribution system.

Fig. 2. Flowchart of particle swarm optimization algorithm is applied

for optimal multi-DG placement.

6. Tested Systems and Experimental Results

6.1 Tested Systems
PSO techniques will be tested in following two radial
distribution test systems. The first system is 33 bus
radial distribution and its total load is 3.72 MW and 2.3
MVar. This test system is the modified form of the one
used in [6]. The real power loss in the system is
221.4346 kW while the reactive power loss in it is
150.1784 kVar.
The second one is 69 bus radial distribution that has a
total load of 3.80 MW and 2.69 MVar and is the
modified form of the one used in [7]. The real and
reactive power losses of the system are 230.0372 kW
and 104.3791 kVar respectively.

6.2 Experimental Results

For PSO model, the number of particles is set to 200
(population) and the stop criterion is 100 generation.
The results of DG difficult types are described in the
table 1 to 4. The PSO-based optimization algorithm has
presented optimal multi-DG placement. The APSO
results are compared with a reload flow algorithm [1]
and PSO [5] in previous works. In the first table, the
objective function is PLoss (real power loss) which is

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Table 3. The results of optimal DGs type3 placement.

minimized to find out the best result. This paper

presents BPSO and APSO to apply for DG installation
plan. The table1-4 shows the methods which are
compared, location (Bus number), DG size, real power
loss and reactive power loss which are basic columns.
The power loss calculation of APSO is less than the
results of [1], [5] and BPSO.
Table 1.The results of optimal DGs type1 placement.

Table 4. The results of optimal DGs type4 placement.

Table 2. The results of optimal DGs type2 placement.

Table 5.Statistic variances of APSO algorithm for multiple DGs type1

From results of table 1, table 2 and table 3, if the

number of DG is increased, total real power loss in the
system will be decreased. Normally, the location of one
DG installation will be used again to be new locations in
two and three DG placement.
In Table 4, DG regulates the bus voltage, it implies
that DG can supply a both of real power and reactive
power to maintain voltage level of all buses in systems.
From the results, they are noticed that the real power
loss is least when comparing with other DG types.

Table 5 shows statistic analyses of PSO algorithm for

one DG in different types of DG. SD and CV denote
standard
deviation
and
co-efficient
variant
reprehensively, which are two important factors of the
reliable quality measures of statistical analyses. If the
standard deviation is very minimum, it shows that the
solution obtained in each of 100 iterations are more or
less equal to the differences between the solutions and
value of iteration. From the results presented in Table 5,
they can observe that APSO is effective for optimal
multiple DG type1 placement.

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in each type will be further investigated.

8. Acknowledgment
This research is supported by the Energy Policy and
Planning Office (EPPO) of Ministry of Energy
Thailand. The authors would like to thank Dr.Nadarajah
Mithulananthan and Dr.Voratas Kachitvichyanukul for
their comments.

9. References
Fig. 3. Voltage levels for a 33 bus radial distribution system.
(DG type1)

[1]

Fig. 3 depicts voltage profile of each bus in 33 bus

distribution. Voltage base of these systems is 12.66 kV
and 10 MVA for MVA base. The results show that the
different voltage level while before installing DGs and
after installing DGs. Before DG installation, voltage
levels from bus number 21 to 33 are lower than standard
voltage levels (0.9pu.) After DG installation, the voltage
levels of those buses are improved and the lowest level
is at the bus number 33(0.92pu.). Furthermore, if the
number of DGs is increased, the voltage levels will be
upper the previous levels.

[2]
[3]
[4]

[5]

[6]

166
APSO
BPSO

164

Real power loss(kW)

162

[7]

160
158

[8]

156
154
152

P.Mahat, "Optimal placement of distributed generation in a

distribution system", AIT Master Thesis No. ET-05-21,
December, 2005 , pp. 22-26
M.Saillaja Kumari, "Improved Particle Swarm Algorithm
Applied to Optimal Reactive Power Control", IEEE, 2006,
pp.1873-1878
P.Kunder, Power System Stability and Control. McGraw-Hill,
1994, pp.634
Y.Li , D.Yao and W.Chen ,Adaptive Particle Swarm Optimizer
for Beam Angle Selection in Radiotherapy Planning, IEEE
International Conference on Mechatronics & Automation ,July
2005, pp.421-425
W.Kuersuk and W.Ongsakul, Optimal placement of Distributed
Generation using particle swarm optimization, , Australian
Universities Power Engineering Conference 2006 (AUPEC 06) ,
Dec.2006
M.A. Kashem, V. Ganapathy, G.B. Jasmon, M.I. Buhari, A
Novel Method for Loss Minimization in Distribution Networks,
Proc. Of International Conference on Electric Utility
Deregulation and Restructuring and Power Technologies, 2000,
pp. 251-255
M.E. Baran and F.F. Wu, Optimal Sizing of Capacitor Placed on
Radial Distribution Systems, IEEE Trans, Vol. PWRD-2, 1989,
pp. 735-743
M.Senthil Arumugam , A.Chandramohan and M.V.C.Rao,
Competitive Approaches to PSO Algorithms via New
Acceleration Co-efficient Variant with Mutation Operators,
IEEE
Proceedings
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the
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International
Conference(ICCIMA05), 2005

150
148

10

20

30

40

50
60
Generations

70

80

90

100

Fig. 4. Real power loss in a 69 bus radial distribution system.

(Two DGs type2)

In Fig. 4, the results on the optimization function define

in the total real power loss of 69 bus radial distribution
system. The graph shows two lines which depict
between APSO and BPSO. APSO line can decrease
below to 150.5186 kW while BPSO line is stable at
151.0391 kW. In this condition, the population and
generations are used for all both methods.

Witoon Prommee received his B.Eng. and M.Eng. both in Electrical

Engineering in 2001 and 2003 at Ubon Ratchathani University and
Kasetsart University, Thailand respectively. He is now a doctoral
student at Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), Thailand and is one of
lecturers at Rajamangala University of Technology Lanna. His
research interests include the optimization by Artificial Intelligence
(AI) application in power system and energy management systems.
Dr.Weerakorn Ongsakul received his B.Eng. from Chulalongkorn
University, Thailand, M.S. and Ph.D. from Texas A&M University,
USA, all degrees in electrical engineering, in 1988, 1991 and 1994
respectively. Currently he is an Associate Professor at AIT, Bangkok
Thailand. His research interest includes AI applications to power
systems, parallel processing applications, power system operation &
control, and power system restructuring.

7. Conclusion
In this paper, APSO is proposed for optimal
multi-distributed generation placement. Test results
indicate that the PSO-based algorithm is efficiently
finding the optimal multi-DG placement, compared to
BPSO and repetitive load flows, Type 4 DG is the best
choice for loss reduction because it can supply real
power and reactive power. The optimal number of DG

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