As electricity demands and transactions in power markets constantly increase and incur huge changing power flows, enhancement of transmission system load-ability is becoming more urgent than ever. Determination of the best reinforcement for networks can be formulated as a mixed discrete-continuous nonlinear optimization problem (MDCP) to determine the locations and capacities for installation of two types of flexible AC transmission systems (FACTS) devices, namely static var compensator (SVC) and thyristor controlled series compensator (TCSC). In the paper, a fitness sharing modified particle swarm optimization (PSO) method is proposed to solve the MDCP. By combining the fitness sharing scheme into the PSO process, the searching regions of the particles can be diversified as much as possible, consequently largely raising the possibility to achieve the optimal solution.