Solving the capacitor placement problem in a radial distribution system using Tabu Search approach

In this paper, the capacitor placement problem in a radial distribution system is formulated and solved by a Tabu Search (TS) based solution algorithm. The capacitor placement problem considers practical operating constraints of capacitors, load growth, capacity of the feeder and the upper and lower bound constraints of voltage at different load levels to minimize the investment cost of capacitors and system energy loss. A sensitivity analysis method is used to select the candidate installation locations of the capacitors to reduce the search space of this problem a priori. Comparison results of the TS method with the simulated annealing (SA) show that the proposed TS method can offer the nearly optimal solution to the capacitor placement problem within reasonable computing time.