An immune-based optimization method to capacitor placement in a radial distribution system

An Immune Algorithm (IA) based optimization approach for solving the capacitor placement problem is proposed in this paper. In the capacitor placement problem, those practical capacitor operating constraints, load profiles, feeder capacities and allowable voltage limits at different load levels are all considered while the investment cost and energy loss are minimized. In the proposed method, objective functions and constraints are represented as antigens. Through the genetic evolution, an antibody that most fits the antigen becomes the solution. In this IA computation, an affinity calculation process is also embedded to guarantee the diversity. The process stagnation can be thus better prevented. The proposed method has been applied to a test system and the results are compared with other published techniques.