Optimal capacitor placement in radial distribution systems using teaching learning based optimization

• This paper presents TLBO algorithm to solve optimal capacitor placement (OCP) problem.
• OCP problem is studied with two different objectives of reducing power loss and total cost.
• Three illustrative examples of radial distribution network are presented.
• Proposed method outperforms other techniques in terms of the quality of solution.

This paper presents teaching learning based optimization (TLBO) approach to minimize power loss and energy cost by optimal placement of capacitors in radial distribution systems. The proposed algorithm is based on two basic concept of education namely teaching phase and learning phase. In first phase, learners improve their knowledge or ability through the teaching methodology of teacher and in second part learners increase their knowledge by interactions among themselves. To check the feasibility, the proposed method is applied on standard 22, 69, 85 and 141 bus radial distribution systems. Numerical experiments are included to demonstrate that the proposed TLBO can obtain better quality solution than many existing techniques like genetic algorithm (GA), particle swarm optimization (PSO), direct search algorithm (DSA) and mixed integer linear programming (MILP) approach.