CAPACITOR PLACEMENT, REPLACEMENT AND CONTROL IN LARGE-SCALE DISTRIBUTION-SYSTEMS BY A GA-BASED 2-STAGE ALGORITHM

This paper presents a two-stage algorithm tailored for capacitor place ment, replacement and control of general, large-scale, unbalanced dist ribution systems. The first stage of the proposed algorithm consists o f a GA followed by the second stage which consists of a sensitivity-ba sed heuristic method tailored for the capacitor placement, replacement and control problem. The two-stage algorithm is designed to take adva ntage of the merits of each technique. The GA is employed to find neig hborhoods of high quality solutions and to provide a good initial gues s for the sensitivity-based heuristic. The heuristic uses the sensitiv ity of real power loss to reactive power to quickly and locally improv e upon the solution provided by the GA with less computation than by a llowing the GA to continue. The two-stage algorithm was implemented in the C programming language and tested for a 292 bus unbalanced system with single, two and three-phase branches and grounded and ungrounded portions of the network with promising results.