Optimal Power Flow Model of Radial Distribution Feeders

For an existing IEEE 13-node feeder, Genetic Algorithm (GA) based method is applied to determine the optimal solution to the DOPF problem. An approach to solve optimality problem was proposed, in which a compromise is made on optimality in order to reduce the computational burden. In this paper a 9-bus feeder circuit is developed and performed power flow studies by using MATPOWER 4.1 software. The previously proposed GA method is compared with it, in terms of both optimality and computational burden. When compared with GA-based method, newly proposed heuristic solution method yields to superior solutions reasonably close to the global optima at a significantly reduced computational burden, demonstrating that the heuristic solution method has the potential to improve distribution system operation in practical real-time applications. The results show that the GA-based method yields solutions in terms of optimality but at a rather large computational cost, making it unsuitable for practical