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Higher load growth in the distribution system and its consequences on higher voltage deviation, feeders overloading, and distribution system loss increase have a bad effect on system quality. Global warming and the dwindling supply of fossil fuels also make it imperative to search for more effective alternatives that guarantee appropriate operating level of power losses and voltage profile at different points of the distribution networks. Capacitor banks (CBs), renewable distributed generators (DGs), and automatic voltage regulators (AVRs) can be considered the most suitable enhancement devices for distribution systems that reduce both pollution and power losses, improving the voltage profile, ..., etc, if they are optimally sized and sited. The objective of this paper is to investigate the optimal placement of each of the 3 mentioned solutions (CBs, DGs, and AVRs) on a part of real Egyptian distribution system. This system is an old, long, weak, and heavily loaded distribution system with high power losses (about 29% of system loading) and poor voltage regulation (about 30%). Each introduced solution has been evaluated according to power loss minimization and investment cost minimization. A new modification to the backward-forward power flow method for radial distribution system embedded AVRs has been proposed, which facilitates the placement procedure of AVRs and reduces computation time as compared to other methods. In this paper, an optimal placement of the combined CBs, DGs, and AVRs has also been introduced based on integrated particle swarm optimization technique and rough set theory. The proposed approach aims to minimize the problem complexity and reduce the storage capacity required for the optimization problem.

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This paper proposes backtracking search optimizer (BSO) for solving the reactive power dispatch (RPD) problem. The RPD problem is highly nonlinear, nonconvex optimization problem and is consisting of both continuous and discrete control variables. It aims to find the optimal settings of the generator voltages, tap positions of tap changing transformers, and the amount of reactive compensation that able to optimize the transmission power losses. BSO has simple structure and single control parameter. It has two new tuned mutation and crossover operators that control the amplitude of the search-direction matrix and search space boundaries. In this paper, five diversified generation strategies of mutation factor of BSO to solve the RPD. The proposed BSO strategies are applied to the IEEE standard 14-, 30-, 57-bus test systems, and a real power system at West Delta region system as a part of the unified Egyptian network. Simulation results show that the BSO strategy, which almost generates mutation factor concentrated on the mean value of the normal distribution (BSO 4) assigns multidirections through the search space and supports the diversity of populations. To show the effectiveness and superiority of proposed BSO, the obtained results are compared with different algorithms reported in the literature.Index Terms-Backtracking search optimizer (BSO), evolutionary algorithms, power losses, reactive power dispatch (RPD), statistical indices, tuned mutation strategies.