A Hybrid Evolutionary Computation Algorithm for Optimal Reactive Power Dispatch Considering Voltage Magnitude Deviation

This paper proposes a hybrid evolutionary computation (HEC) algorithm for solving the optimal reactive power dispatch (ORPD) problem. Traditionally, ORPD is defined as the minimization of active power transmission losses by controlling a number of control variables. In this paper, the deviation of bus voltage magnitude which influences the security operation of power transmission systems is also considered as an objective function. ORPD is typically a nonlinear constrained optimization problem. The proposed HEC algorithm combines basic differential evolution (DE) algorithm and probabilistic state transition rule used in the ant system to deal with the ORPD problem. To verify the performance of the proposed method, the similar evolution approaches such as evolutionary programming (EP) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) are also implemented using the same database. The proposed method has been verified on the IEEE 30-bus 6-generator system. Testing results indicate that the proposed HEC can obtain better results than the other methods in terms of active power transmission losses, voltage magnitude deviation, and convergence performance.