a b s t r a c t

A new metaheuristic method, the Cuckoo Search (CS) algorithm, based on the life of a bird family is proposed in this paper for optimal design of static synchronous compensator (STATCOM) in a multimachine environment. PV curves are illustrated to determine the best location of STATCOM. The STATCOM parameter tuning problem is converted to an optimization problem which is solved by CS Algorithm. The

performance of the proposed CS based STATCOM (CSSTATCOM) is compared with Genetic Algorithm (GA) based STATCOM (GASTATCOM) and open loop STATCOM under various operating conditions and disturbances.The superiority of the proposed technique in damping oscillations and enhancing voltage profiles is confirmed through igenvalues and time domain simulation results over the GA and open loop one