Optimal Capacitor Placement in Radial Distribution Systems using Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) Algorithm

Abstract

This paper presents a new method which applies an artificial bee colony algorithm (ABC) for capacitor placement in distribution systems with an objective of improving the voltage profile and reduction of power loss. The solution methodology has two parts: in part one the loss sensitivity factors are used to select the candidate locations for the capacitor placement and in part two a new algorithm called Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm(ABC) is used to estimate the optimal size of capacitors at the optimal buses determined in part one. The ABC algorithm is a new population based meta heuristic approach inspired by intelligent foraging behavior of honeybee swarm. The advantage of ABC algorithm is that it does not require external parameters such as cross over rate and mutation rate as in case of genetic algorithm and differential evolution and it is hard to determine these parameters in prior. The other advantage is that the global search ability in the algorithm is implemented by introducing neighborhood source production mechanism which is a similar to mutation process. To demonstrate the validity of the proposed algorithm, computer simulations are carried out on 34-bus system and compared the results with the other approach available in the literature. The proposed method has outperformed the other methods in terms of the quality of solution and computational efficiency.