METHODS ENRICHING POWER & ENERGY DEVELOPMENTS (MEPED'13)

April 12th, 2013 ISSN:-2230-7850

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

OPTIMAL CAPACITOR PLACEMENT IN A RADIAL DISTRIBUTION

SYSTEM USING DIJKSTRA ALGORITHM

SRIVIDYA.V1 , NETHAJI JEYAGOPAL 2 AND Y.MOHAMED SHUAIB3

1&2
Student, 3Assistant professor
B.S.Abdur Rahman Univesity Vandalur ,Chennai, Tamil Nadu

Abstract:

This paper presents a new and efficient approach for capacitor placement in
radial distribution systems (RDS) that determine the optimal locations and size of
capacitor with an objective of improving the voltage profile and reduction of power loss.
The solution methodology has two parts: in part one the loss sensitivity factors (LSF) are
used to select the candidate locations for the capacitor placement and in part two a new
algorithm that employs Dijkstra Algorithm (DA) is used to estimate the optimal size of
capacitors at the optimal buses determined in part one. The main advantage of the
proposed method is that it does not require any external control parameters. The other
advantage is that it handles the objective function and the constraints separately. The
proposed method is applied to 33 & 69 RDS. The solutions obtained by the proposed
method are compared with other methods. The proposed method has outperformed the
other methods in terms of the quality of solution.

KEYWORDS-

Distribution systems, Capacitor placement, Loss reduction, Loss sensitivity factors, Dijkstra
Algorithm.

I.INTRODUCTION

The loss minimization in RDS has acquired greater significance recently since the trend towards
distribution automation will require the most efficient operating scenario for economic viability variations.
Studies have indicated that as much as 13% of total power generated is wasted in the form of losses at the
distribution level [1]. To reduce these losses, shunt capacitor banks are installed on distribution primary
feeders. The advantages with the addition of shunt capacitors banks are to improve the power factor, feeder
voltage profile, Power loss reduction and increases available capacity of feeders. Therefore it is important
to find optimal location and sizes of capacitors in the system to achieve the above mentioned objectives.
Since, the optimal capacitor placement is a complicated combinatorial optimization problem,
many different optimization techniques and algorithms have been proposed in the past. Schmill [2]
developed a basic theory of optimal capacitor placement. He presented his well-known 2/3 rule for the
placement of one capacitor assuming a uniform load and a uniform distribution feeder. Duran [3]
considered the capacitor sizes as discrete variables and employed dynamic programming to solve the
problem. Grainger and Lee [4] developed a nonlinear programming based method in which capacitor
location and capacity were expressed as continuous variables. Grainger and Civanlar [5] formulated the
capacitor placement and voltage regulators problem and proposed decoupled solution methodology for
general distribution system. Baran and Wu [6,7] presented a method with mixed integer programming.
Sundharajan and Pahwa [8] proposed the genetic algorithm approach to determine the optimal placement of
capacitors based on the mechanism of natural selection. In most of the methods mentioned above, the
capacitors are often assumed as continuous variables. However, the commercially available capacitors are
discrete. Selecting integer capacitor sizes closest to the optimal values found by the continuous variable

Indian Streams Research Journal

OPTIMAL CAPACITOR PLACEMENT IN A RADIAL DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM USING DIJKSTRA ALGORITHM

approach may not guarantee an optimal solution [9]. Therefore the optimal capacitor placement should be
viewed as an integer-programming problem, and discrete capacitors are considered in this paper. As a
result, the possible solutions will become a very large number even for a medium sized distribution system
and makes the solution searching process become a heavy burden.
In this paper, Capacitor Placement and Sizing is done by Loss Sensitivity Factors and Dijkstra
Algorithm respectively. LSF is able to predict which bus will have the biggest loss reduction when a
capacitor is placed. Therefore, these sensitive buses can serve as candidate locations for the capacitor
placement. DA is used for estimation of required level of shunt capacitive compensation to improve the
voltage profile of the system. The proposed method is tested on 33 & 69 bus RDS and results are very
promising. The advantages with the DA are that it treats the objective function and constraints separately
and makes the increase/decrease of constraints convenient, and that it does not need any external
parameters such as crossover rate, and mutation rate. It adopts a guiding search direction that changes
dynamically as the change of the objective function.
This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 gives the problem formulation; Section 3 describes
the sensitivity analysis and LSF; Section 4 provides brief description of the Dijkstra Algorithm; Section 5
develops the test results and Section 6 gives conclusions.

II.PROBLEM FORMULATION

The objective of capacitor placement in the distribution system is to minimize the annual cost of
the system, subjected to certain operating constraints and load pattern. For simplicity, the operation and
maintenance cost of the capacitor placed in the distribution system is not taken into consideration. The three
phase system is considered as balanced and loads are assumed as time invariant.

Mathematically, the objective function of the problem is described as:

where COST is the objective function which includes the cost of power loss and the capacitor
placement. The voltage magnitude at each bus must be maintained within its limits and is expressed as:

where |Vi| is the voltage magnitude of bus i, Vmin and Vmax are bus minimum and maximum
voltage limits, respectively. The power flows are computed by the following set of simplified recursive
equations derived from the single-line diagram depicted in Fig. 1.

where Pi and Qi are the real and reactive powers flowing out of bus i, and PLi and QLi are the real
and reactive load powers at bus i. The resistance and reactance of the line section between buses i and i + 1
are denoted by Ri,i+1, and Xi,i+1, respectively.
The power loss of the line section connecting buses i and i + 1 may be computed as:

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OPTIMAL CAPACITOR PLACEMENT IN A RADIAL DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM USING DIJKSTRA ALGORITHM

Fig . 1 . Singl e lin e diagr am

The total power loss of the feeder, PT, Loss, may then be determined by summing up the losses of
all line sections of the feeder, which is given as:

Considering the practical capacitors, there exists a finite number of standard sizes which are integer
multiples of the smallest size Q0c .Besides, the cost per kVAr varies from one size to another. In general,
capacitors of larger size have lower unit prices. The available capacitor size is usually limited to:

where L is an integer. Therefore, for each installation location, there are L capacitor sizes {Q0c , 2Q0c ; 3Q0c
;.......LQ0c }available. Given the annual installation cost for each compensated bus, the total cost due to
capacitor placement and power loss change is written as:

where n is number of candidate locations for capacitor placement, Kp is the equivalent annual cost
per unit of power loss in $/(kWyear); Kcf is the fixed cost for the capacitor placement. The constant Kci is
the annual capacitor installation cost, and, i = 1, 2. . . N are the indices of the buses selected for
compensation. The bus reactive compensation power is limited to:

where Qic and Qli are the reactive power compensated at bus i and the reactive load power at bus i,
respectively.
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III.SENSITIVITY ANALYSIS AND LOSS SENSITIVITY FACTORS

The candidate nodes for the placement of capacitors are determined using the loss sensitivity
factors. The estimation of these candidate nodes basically helps in reduction of the search space for the
optimization procedure.
Consider a distribution line with an impedance R + jX and a load of Peff + jQeff connected
between 'p' and 'q' buses as given below.

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OPTIMAL CAPACITOR PLACEMENT IN A RADIAL DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM USING DIJKSTRA ALGORITHM

Fig.21. Single line diagram of a model distribution line.

Active power loss given in (6) is rewritten for kth line between buses p and q as,

Similarly the reactive power loss in the kth line is given by

where Peff[q] = Total effective active power supplied beyond the node 'q'. Qeff[q] = Total effective
reactive power supplied beyond the node 'q'. Now, both the Loss Sensitivity Factors can be obtained as
shown below:

A.Candidate node selection using loss sensitivity factors

The Loss Sensitivity Factors (∂Plineloss/∂Qeff) are calculated from the base case load flows and
the values are arranged in descending order for all the lines of the given system. A vector bus position
'bpos[i]' is used to store the respective 'end' buses of the lines arranged in descending order of the values (∂
Plineloss/∂Qeff). The descending order of (∂ Plineloss/∂Qeff) elements of ''bpos[i]' vector will decide the
sequence in which the buses are to be considered for compensation. This sequence is purely governed by
the ∂ Plineloss/∂ Qeff and hence the proposed 'Loss Sensitive Coefficient' factors become very powerful
and useful in capacitor allocation or Placement. At these buses of 'bpos[i]' vector, normalized voltage
magnitudes are calculated by considering the base case voltage magnitudes given by (norm[i] = V[i]/0.95).
Now for the buses whose norm[i] value is less than 1.01 are considered as the candidate buses requiring the
Capacitor Placement. These candidate buses are stored in 'rank bus' vector. It is worth note that the LSF
decide the sequence in which buses are to be considered for compensation placement and the 'norm[i]'
decides whether the buses needs Q-Compensation or not. If the voltage at a bus in the sequence list is
healthy (i.e., norm[i] > 1.01) such bus needs no compensation and that bus will not be listed in the 'rank bus'
vector. The 'rank bus' vector offers the information about the possible potential or candidate buses for
capacitor placement. The sizing of Capacitors at buses listed in the 'rank bus' vector is done by using DA.

IV.DIJKSTRA ALGORITHM

The basic idea of DA is to explore the shortest path [Fig.3] from source point (labeled as s) to
outside gradually. In execution process assign a number to each point (called the label of this point), which
expresses the weight of the shortest path from s to this point (named as P label) or upper bound of the weight

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OPTIMAL CAPACITOR PLACEMENT IN A RADIAL DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM USING DIJKSTRA ALGORITHM

of the shortest path from s to this point(named as T label). In each step, modify T label, and alter the point
with T label to point with P label, so that the number of vertex with P label in graph G increases one, then we
can obtain the shortest path from s to each point only by n-1 steps (n is the number of vertexes in graph G). In
order to optimize the algorithm, here we express DA in another way. Suppose each point has a pair of label
(dj， pj). dj is the length of the shortest path from the starting point s to the end point j, and pj is the front
point of j in the shortest path from s to j. The basic process of solving the shortest path algorithm from the
starting point s to point j is described as follows:

　
（１）
Initialization.
　　　　　　Set the starting point as: ①ds=0, ps is null; ②all other points: di=∞，　
pi=?; ③mark the starting point s
as k=s and all other points as unlabeled.
（２）　Examine the distance between the marked point k and unlabeled point j that is directly connected to k.
Set dj=min[dj，dk+lkj], lkj is direct connection distance between k and j.
（３）　Choose the next point. Choose the smallest i in di from all unlabeled points: if di=min[dj, all unlabeled
point j], then i is selected as one point of the shortest path and set as marked.
（４）　Find the front point of i. Find j connected directly to i from marked points, make it as front point and set
pi=j.
（５）　Mark i. If the target point has been marked or all points have been marked, then the algorithm is finished,
otherwise set k=i and turn back to step (2) to continue. As can be seen from above, in the process of
achieving DA, the core step is to choose an arc with the shortest weight from unlabelled points. This is a
cyclic comparing process. If the unlabelled points are stored in a linked list or array in unordered form, we
have to scan all the points to choose an arc with the shortest weight. It will affect computing speed in the
case of large amount of data.

V.TEST RESULTS

The proposed method has been programmed using MATLAB and run on an Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-
2410M CPU @ 2.30GHz-4GB RAM personal computer. The effectiveness of the proposed method for loss
reduction by capacitor placement is tested on 33 [17] and 69 bus radial distribution systems. The results
obtained in these methods are explained in the following sections.

A. 33-bus system

The first test case for the proposed method is a 33-bus, single feeder, RDS [9] shown in Fig. 3. This
system has three laterals. The rated line voltage of the system is 22 kV. For this test feeder, KP is selected to
be 168 $/(kW/year) [9]. Only fixed capacitors are used in the analysis and the marginal cost of capacitors Kic
［１１ 　
are used to compute the total annual cost. The fixed cost of the capacitor, Kcf is selected as $1000 [13]
with a life expectancy of 10 years (the maintenance and running costs are neglected).
The substation voltage (bus 1) is considered as 1.0 p.u. The limit of voltage magnitude is taken
between 0.95 and 1.05 p.u. The method of sensitive analysis is used to select the candidate installation
locations of the capacitors to reduce the search space. The buses are ordered according to their sensitivity
value (∂Plineloss/∂Qeff) （ i.e., bus 6, 28, 29, 8, 30 and so on). Top two buses are selected as optimal
candidate locations and then amount of kVAR to be injected in the selected buses is optimized by Dijkstra
Algorithm. Using this method, the capacitors of rating 150, 1050 kVAR are placed at the optimal candidate
locations 6 and 28, respectively. The initial power loss is 211 kW and it is reduced to 157.18 kW after
capacitor placement using the proposed method. The results of the proposed method are shown in Table I.

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OPTIMAL CAPACITOR PLACEMENT IN A RADIAL DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM USING DIJKSTRA ALGORITHM

Fig. 3.33 Bus Test System

Fig 4. Shortest Distance- search space for 33 Bus system

TABLE I. COMPARISON OF RESULTS - 33 BUS

BASE CAPACITOR
ITEM CASE SIZING USING DA

Minimum Voltage (pu) 0.9037 0.9702

Maximum Voltage (pu) 1 1
Power losses (kw) 211 157.18
% of Real power loss 5.37% 4.23%
Loss reducti on(%) NIL 25.51%
Annual Cost for Real powe r
loss ($) 35448 26406.24
Annual Cost of Sav ings ($) NIL 9041.76

B.69-bus system

The second test case for the proposed method is a 69-bus [18], single feeder, radial distribution

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OPTIMAL CAPACITOR PLACEMENT IN A RADIAL DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM USING DIJKSTRA ALGORITHM

system [9] shown in Fig. 5. This system has seven laterals. The rated line voltage of the system is 22 kV. For
this test feeder, KP is selected to be 168 $/(kW/year) [9]. Only fixed capacitors are used in the analysis and
the marginal cost of capacitors Kic ［１１］ 　are used to compute the total annual cost. The fixed cost of the
capacitor, Kcf is selected as $1000 [13] with a life expectancy of 10 years (the maintenance and running
costs are neglected).
The substation voltage (bus 1) is considered as 1.0 p.u. The limit of voltage magnitude is taken
between 0.95 and 1.05 p.u. The method of sensitive analysis is used to select the candidate installation
locations of the capacitors to reduce the search space. The buses are ordered according to their sensitivity
value (∂Plineloss/∂Qeff) （ i.e., bus 57, 58, 61, 60, 59 and so on). Top two buses are selected as optimal
candidate locations and then amount of kVAR to be injected in the selected buses is optimized by Dijkstra
Algorithm. Using this method, the capacitors of rating 750, 450 kVAR are placed at the optimal candidate
locations 57 and 58, respectively. The initial power loss is 224.8949 kW and it is reduced to 168.94 kW after
capacitor placement using the proposed method. The results of the proposed method are shown in Table II.

Fig .5. Shortest Distance- search space for 69 Bus system

Fig. 6. 69 Bus Test System

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OPTIMAL CAPACITOR PLACEMENT IN A RADIAL DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM USING DIJKSTRA ALGORITHM

TABLE II. COMPARISON OF RESULTS - 69 BUS

BASE CAPACITOR
ITEM CASE SIZING USING DA

Minimum Voltage (pu) 0.9092 0.9502

Maximum Voltage (pu) 1 1
Power losses (kw) 224.8949 168.94
% of Real power loss 5.92% 4.44%
Loss reducti on(%) NIL 24.88%
Annual Cost for Real powe r
loss ($) 37782.343 28381.92
Annual Cost of Sav ings ($) NIL 9400.4232

VI.CONCLUSION

In this paper, the developed Dijkstra Algorithm was tested on 33 & 69 -bus test system to find the
optimal locations and sizes of shunt capacitors. The objective was to minimize the total cost of the system
real power loss and the shunt capacitors to be installed. The objective function was subject to some
operating constraints and power quality constraints. Simulation results for the 33 & 69 bus test network are
presented and compared with the results generated by other algorithms. The proposed Dijkstra Algorithm is
capable of determining the near global solution.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

We express our sincere thanks to Dr. M.Abdullah khan, Professor of Eminence and Mr.Y.
Mohamed Shuaib, Assistant professor (selection grade), B.S.Abdur Rahman University,Chennai for their
unstinted support and guidance throughout the paper. We wish to express our sincere gratitude to Mr
Chandrasekar, HOD/EEE and Mr Karthikeyan, AP/EEE of Tagore Engineering College, Chennai for
helping us in completing this paper. We owe a great many thanks to Mr. Sukumar, Mr. Nallasivan, Mr.
sivaiyan, Mr.Murugesan, Mr.Muthukumar, people from TNEB (Chennai & Dindigul) who have rendered
their support for doing our paper.

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