Capacitor placement for transmission systems using ordinal optimization approach

Capacitor placement is a hard problem in power system research, because it involves integer variables for determining the placement locations and discrete variables for deciding the number of capacitor banks to be installed, and it is a large-dimension constrained optimization problem for considering the system constraints and, investment constraint. In this paper, we propose an ordinal Optimization (OO) approach to solve this problem. Our approach consists of five OO iterations. The size and solution quality of the resulting candidate solution set is reduced and improved iteration by iteration, and we obtain a good enough capacitor placement pattern in the final iteration. To demonstrate the computational efficiency of our approach and the quality of the obtained solutions, we have compared with the genetic algorithm and tabu search method. The test results show that our approach is an excellent approach for the capacitor placement problem.