The restructuring of the electrical market, improvement in the technologies of energy production, and energy crisis have paved the way for increasing applications of distributed generation (DG) resources in recent years. Installing DG units in a distribution network may result in positive impacts, such as voltage profile improvement and loss reduction, and negative impacts, such as an increase in the short-circuit level. These impacts depend on the type, capacity, and place of these resources. Therefore, finding the optimal place and capacity of DG resources is of crucial importance. Accordingly, this paper is aimed at finding the optimal place and capacity of DG resources, in order to improve the technical parameters of the network, including the power losses, voltage profile, and short-circuit level. The proposed formulation of this paper significantly increases the convergence and the speed of the finding the answers. Furthermore, to select the optimal weighting coefficients, an algorithm is proposed. The weighting coefficients are decided on according to the requirements of each network and deciding on them optimally prevents the arbitrarily selection of these resources. The genetic algorithm is used to minimize the objective function and to find the best answers during the investigation. Finally, the proposed algorithm is tested on the Zanjan Province distribution network in Iran and the simulation results are presented and discussed.
