In this study, an optimal reactive power (Volt/VAr) control of smart inverters for photovoltaic (PV) and battery energy storage systems (BESSs) to improve the PV hosting capacity (PVHC) of distribution networks is proposed. The primary objective of the proposed method is to improve the PVHC of a distribution network by determining the optimal oversize, dispatch, and control setting of the Volt/VAr functions of the smart inverters for both PVs and BESSs. Concurrently, the optimal locations of the PVs and BESSs are determined. The problem is formulated as a multi-objective mixed-integer nonlinear optimization to maximize the PVHC and minimize the voltage deviation simultaneously. A bio-inspired metaheuristic optimization method, i.e., the slime mould algorithm (SMA), is employed to solve the optimization problem. To assess the efficacy of the proposed PVHC improvement method, extensive simulations are conducted on an IEEE 33-node system using MATLAB software. The simulation results verify that the proposed method improves the PVHC of the distribution network compared to different cases and the default Volt/VAr control settings of the smart inverters. Furthermore, the SMA optimization method provides superior performance in finding the optimal PVHC of a distribution network compared to the conventional metaheuristic optimization methods.

One of the crucial challenges of the distribution network is the unintentionally isolated section of electricity from the power network, called unintentional islanding. Unintentional islanding detection is severed when the local generation is equal to or closely matches the load requirement. In this paper, both ensemble learning and canonical methods are implemented for the islanding detection technique of synchronous machine‐based distributed generation. The ensemble learning models for this study are random forest (RF) and Ada boost, while the canonical methods are multi‐layer perceptron (MLP), decision tree (DT), and support vector machine (SVM). The training and testing parameters for this technique are the total harmonic distortion (THD) of both current and voltage signals. THD is the most important parameter of power quality monitoring under islanding scenarios. The parameter and data extraction from the test system is executed in a MATLAB/Simulink environment, whereas the training and testing of the presented techniques are implemented in Python. Performance indices such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F 1 score are used for evaluation, and both ensemble learning models and canonical models demonstrate good performance. Ada‐boost shows the highest accuracy among all the five models with original data, while RF is robust and gives the best results with noisy data (20 and 30 dB) because of its ensemble nature.