Abstract: This paper presents and comprehensive objective function considering network energy loss,node voltage level and investment reactive compensation equipment.Penalty function is considered to deal with variables violating the constraints.Its principal means is to regulate transformer rate and to parallel with capacitors.This paper implements reactive power optimization calculation based on above mathematical model by genetic algorithm,which has good algorithm efficiency and ability of global optimization.The method proposed in this paper is proved to be applicable and effective.

Key words: distribution network, reactive power optimization, genetic algorithm