Capacitor placement using parallel tabu search in distribution systems

This paper proposes an efficient method for capacitor placement in distribution systems. The proposed method is based on parallel tabu search that considers the decomposition of the neighborhood into subneighborhoods and the multiple tabu lengths in tabu search. Capacitor placement is an important problem to maintain the voltage profile in distribution systems. The objective is to determine the location and size of shunt capacitors to be installed at nodes so that the transmission loss and installation cost are minimized. The problem is difficult to solve in the sense that it has high nonlinearity and handles both discrete and continuous variables. Compared with tabu search, the proposed method has a good performance in terms of solution accuracy and computational effort. As one of the meta-heuristics, it focuses on solutions near a global minimum rather than a local one. In that sense, it is expected that the proposed method reduces the cost function efficiently. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated in sample systems