Dual tabu search for capacitor control in distribution systems

In this paper, dual tabu search is presented for capacitor control in distribution systems. Capacitor control is important in maintaining power quality in distribution systems. The problem formulation of capacitor control may be expressed as a combinatorial optimization problem of capacitor banks. Meta-heuristics is more efficient for solving a combinatorial optimization problem. In particular, tabu search of meta-heuristics is one of the promising meta-heuristics. However, tabu search still has room for improving the solution quality in a large-scale combinatorial optimization problem. This paper proposes a new tabu search that makes use of the dual code for the initial value. For a given initial value, the dual code is considered and a couple of initial values allow the algorithm to evaluate better solutions. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated in the 32-node and 69-node distribution systems.