Abstract
Optimal capacitor placement problem is a significant and precious strategy which can be supposed as an always appropriate solution to reduce the operating costs in the power systems. Nevertheless, as the result of nonlinear and discrete characteristics of this problem, traditional optimization methods can not solve it effectively. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel optimization framework based on shuffled frog leaping algorithm (SFLA) to solve the optimal capacitor placement and sizing problem properly. In this regard, a new modification approach based on the mutation and crossover operators is suggested to improve the local search ability of this algorithm. The effectiveness and satisfying performance of the proposed method is assessed on two IEEE test systems. Comparative results sow the superiority of the proposed optimization method than the other popular methods in the area.