A PSO-DV based approach for capacitor placement in radial distribution systems

In this paper, a PSO-DV (Particle Swarm Optimization with Differentially Perturbed Velocity) based approach to find optimal size, number and site of capacitor in radial distribution system is presented. The PSO-DV approach consists of classical Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and differential evolution approach in combination. For capacitor placement problem, the power losses occurring in the system are minimized while voltage profile is improved. Initially to find site of capacitor allocation, candidate nodes using sensitivity analysis w.r.t reactive power injection is done. Then PSO-DV is implemented to find size and number of capacitors considering minimization of power losses as an optimization problem. The proposed approach is tested on 69-bus test system and compared with existing loss sensitivity factor and PSO approach.