A novel order characteristic load shifting policy for load factor improvement, peak reduction, and economical operation of distribution systems

• A novel order characteristic load shifting policy is proposed. • Four new load profiles are obtained by modifying base load profile as per OCLSP. • PAR and peak demand was reduced in the OCLSP based load profiles. • Minimum generation cost was also reduced for the test systems implementing OCLSP. • Circle Search Algorithm was proposed as optimization tool. Demand side management (DSM) and demand response programs (DRPs) are widely used economic strategies that insist customers shift or curtail loads to economize the generation cost of the distribution system. These policies often involve tedious calculation processes or optimization tools to calculate the apt amount of load to be shredded or shifted to get a new modified load profile. This paper proposes an order characterized load-shifting policy (OCLSP), which is very easy to calculate and yields a considerable decrease in the peak demand, eventually improving the distribution system's load factor, also known as the peak-to-average ratio (PAR). Unlike other DSM and DR strategies, the proposed approach requires no parameters except the forecasted load demand. The proposed OCLSP is implemented on ten distribution systems from the literature which consists of a 3-, 6-, 7-, 10-, 15- units system, one islanded microgrid (MG) system and four grid-connected MG systems. Initially, the load demand of these test systems is restructured using OCLSP, and thereafter, dynamic economic load dispatch (DELD) is performed to minimize the generation cost of the system. A latest circle search algorithm (CSA) is utilized as the optimization tool. Results show that the generation cost of all ten test systems has been decreased by a considerable amount when their load demand is restructured using the proposed OCLSP. The minimum percentage improvement in the PAR of the ten systems was 2 % and maximum improvement was 60 %. Likewise, the percentage decrement in the peak demand was within 2 % to 37.5 % for the ten test systems and the decrement in generation cost rose up to 16 %. All these parameters were in comparison with the base load demand. Numerical results also corroborate to the efficiency and robustness of proposed CSA.