Energy Management System for the Optimal Operation of PV Generators in Distribution Systems Using the Antlion Optimizer: A Colombian Urban and Rural Case Study

This paper presents an Energy Management System (EMS) for solving the problem regarding the optimal daily operation of Photovoltaic (PV) distributed generators in Alternate Current (AC) distribution grids. To this effect, a nonlinear programming problem (NLP) was formulated which considered the improvement of economic (investment and maintenance costs), technical (energy losses), and environmental (CO2 emission) grid indices as objective functions, considering all technical and operating constraints for the operation of AC networks with the presence of PV sources. To solve this mathematical formulation, a master–slave methodology was implemented, whose master stage employed the antlion optimizer to find the power dispatch of PV sources in each period of time considered (24 h). In the slave stage, an hourly power flow based on the successive approximations method was used in order to obtain the values of the objective functions and constraints associated with each possible PV power configuration proposed by the master stage. To evaluate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed methodology, two test scenarios were used, which included three installed PV sources in an urban and a rural network, considering the PV power generation and demand located reported for Medellín and Capurganá, respectively. These systems correspond to connected and standalone grids located in two different regions of Colombia. Furthermore, the proposed methodology was compared with three optimization methodologies reported in the literature: the Chu and Beasley genetic algorithm, the particle swarm optimization algorithm, and the vortex search optimization algorithm. Simulation results were obtained via the MATLAB software for both test scenarios with all the optimization methodologies. It was demonstrated that the proposed methodology yields the best results in terms of solution quality and repeatability, with shorter processing times.