Allocation of capacitor banks in distribution systems through a modified monkey search optimization technique

•Modified monkey search is proposed for capacitor allocation in distribution system.•The approach seeks minimal loss with minimum cost of investment in capacitors.•The algorithm considers fixed capacitor banks with practical costs and sizes.•The modifications on the monkey search method lead to good quality solutions.•Different load levels from daily load curves and the voltage levels are considered.

This work presents a methodology for the allocation of fixed capacitor banks in electrical power distribution systems by applying a bio-inspired optimization technique. The goal is to optimize the distribution network operation over a planning horizon by minimizing the system losses with minimum cost of investment in capacitors. For this aim to be achieved, this work proposes improvements to the Monkey Search optimization technique to achieve a better representation of the capacitor allocation problem and to increase the computational efficiency. Distribution systems that are widespread in the literature are used to evaluate the proposed methodology.