This paper presents a new and efficient approach for capacitor placement in

radial distribution systems (RDS) that determine the optimal locations and size of

capacitor with an objective of improving the voltage profile and reduction of power loss.

The solution methodology has two parts: in part one the loss sensitivity factors (LSF) are

used to select the candidate locations for the capacitor placement and in part two a new

algorithm that employs Dijkstra Algorithm (DA) is used to estimate the optimal size of

capacitors at the optimal buses determined in part one. The main advantage of the

proposed method is that it does not require any external control parameters. The other

advantage is that it handles the objective function and the constraints separately. The

proposed method is applied to 33 & 69 RDS. The solutions obtained by the proposed

method are compared with other methods. The proposed method has outperformed the

other methods in terms of the quality of solution.

OPTIMAL C