Capacitor placement is becoming more important in distribution systems due to the increase in the demands for electrical energy. Capacitor placement plays a vital role in reducing real power losses and in enhancing the voltage stability which is the objective function in this problem. This paper proposes a multi-objective technique for optimally determining the location and sizing of capacitor placement in the distribution network. In this paper, a data structure based load flow method is used to find the total real power losses. Cat swarm algorithm is used to find optimal sizing and location of the capacitor. The proposed method is tested on IEEE-33 bus and 69 bus radial distribution systems. This method is compared with other nature-inspired optimization methods. The simulated results illustrate the good applicability and performance of the proposed method. © Research India Publications.