Reducing the cost of distribution system and improving the performance of power system are always accompanying problems in the process of power system development.The installation position and size of capacitor banks are important problems in the reactive power compensation of distribution network.In this paper

a kind of hybrid optimization algorithm based on electromagnetic-like algorithm and particle swarm optimization（PSO） is proposed and is applied to the allocation of capacitor with reactive power compensation.This algorithm makes use of the strong directional advantage of the electromagnetic-like algorithm

makes up for the problem that the particle swarm optimization algorithm is easy to fall into the local optimal solution

and improves the convergence speed of the algorithm significantly.Aiming at the optimal location and size of capacitor banks

the commonly used IEEE 34 bus and IEEE 85 bus distribution network test system are selected.The algorithm is used as the optimization objective function and compared with other algorithms.It is shown by the result that the algorithm has good performance in optimizing capacitor installation and reducing distribution network losses.