Athletic Run Based Optimization: A novel method for the integration of DGs and shunt capacitors

In this paper, a novel Bio-inspired meta-heuristic optimization algorithm is proposed named Athletic Run Based Optimization (ARBO), as the key inspiration comes from finding out the best athlete in a tournament. An athlete is judged according to his/her performance in a tournament. The athletes can improve their existences (fitness) in the race only by practicing hard and the best athlete is chosen based on the performance in the tournament. The proposed optimization method is applied in three different practical design-based optimization problems and compared with PSO and TLBO optimization algorithms. The proposed optimization method is tested on 33 bus distribution network (DN) for the optimal placement of renewable distributed generations (DG) and shunt capacitors by considering the active power loss of the network as the objective function. The per unit average seasonal load variation is considered in this paper for the DGs placement and PSO and TLBO methods are also used to verify the results.