Optimal capacitor placement and sizing via artificial bee colony

Abstract

To achieve a more economical distribution system in the future, several methods have been introduced by researchers to accomplish that goal. Among the most commonly used method is to install the capacitors. It operates by supplying reactive power into the system to improve the performance of voltage, thereby reducing power losses. Nevertheless, the location and the size of the capacitor still issues to be resolved by the utilities. Various methods have been introduced to coordinate the capacitor without affect the performance of the distribution system. Basically, the most popular approach used to determine the location of capacitors is based on sensitivity analysis. This approach operates by placing the capacitor at each node in the system and selects the node that gives higher power losses reduction. Meanwhile, the size of capacitor is determined by using the optimization techniques in obtaining optimal values. However, calculation for both location and size in separate analysis could lead the solution trapped in local optimum. Therefore, this paper is investigated a solution to determine the location and size of capacitor simultaneously by using artificial bee colony (ABC). The effectiveness of proposed method is tested on 33-bus and 69-bus test system and compared with other methods. Based from the obtained results, simultaneous approach reduces the power losses by 34.29% and 35.44% for 33-bus and 69-bus test system, respectively. Moreover, the proposed method gives a better voltage improvement compared to the base case.