Fast hybrid method of parallel tabu search and ordinal optimization for on-line capacitor control in distribution systems

This paper proposes a fast method for on-line capacitor control in distribution systems. The proposed method makes use of a hybrid method of parallel tabu search (PTS) and ordinal optimization (OO) to determine the optimal combination of capacitor banks. OO is used to supplement the performance of PTS so that computational time is significantly reduced to carry out on-line capacitor control. PTS has a couple of strategies. One is the decomposition of the neighborhood of tabu search (TS) into subneighborhoods to speed up computational time. The other is to use multiple tabu lengths that make solution candidates diverse to obtain a better solution. The proposed method is successfully applied to a sample system. A comparison is made between the proposed and conventional methods in terms of computational time and solution accuracy.