A PROBABILISTIC APPROACH FOR OPTIMAL CAPACITOR PLACEMENT IN A DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM USING SIMULTANEOUS PERTURBATION STOCHASTIC APPROXIMATION

This paper deals with the problem of choosing optimal locations and sizes of capacitors in three-phase unbalanced distribution systems. This is a mixed, nonlinear, constrained optimization problem that must be formulated in probabilistic scenarios to take into account the unavoidable uncertainties that affect the problem’s input data. To reduce the computational efforts, a new optimization model with only inequality constraints is formulated and the Simultaneous Perturbation Stochastic Approximation (SPSA) algorithm is applied. The proposed approach is tested on the IEEE 34-node unbalanced distribution systems.