INVASIVE WEED OPTIMIZATION FOR OPTIMAL CAPACITOR PLACEMENT ON A RADIAL DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM

In this paper, Invasive Weed Optimization (IWO) is proposed to optimize the size of capacitors for reducing power loss and improving voltage profiles in a radial distribution system. Power Loss Index has been used to find weak buses in the distribution system and IWO has been applied to find the size of capacitors that are to be placed at the weak buses in order to reduce the power losses and to improve the voltage profile. The proposed approach is developed in MATLAB and tested on various standard test cases such as 10-, 15-, 34- and 69- bus systems. The simulation results obtained by the suggested approach have been compared with the base case system, in terms of power loss and the results have been compared with the existing methods available in the literature. It is found that the proposed approach yields qualitative solution in terms of the power loss.