Diminution of Real Power Loss by Hybridization of Particle Swarm Optimization with Extremal Optimization

Abstract

This paper presents an algorithm for solving the multi-objective reactive power dispatch problem in a power system. Modal analysis of the system is used for static voltage stability assessment. Loss minimization and maximization of voltage stability margin are taken as the objectives. Generator terminal voltages, reactive power generation of the capacitor banks and tap changing transformer setting are taken as the optimization variables. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) has received increasing interest from the optimization community due to its simplicity in implementation and its inexpensive computational overhead. However, PSO has premature convergence, especially in complex multimodal functions. Extremal Optimization (EO) is a recently developed local-search heuristic method and has been successfully applied to a wide variety of hard optimization problems. To overcome the limitation of PSO, this paper proposes a novel hybrid algorithm, called hybrid PSO-EO algorithm, through introducing EO to PSO. The hybrid approach elegantly combines the exploration ability of PSO with the exploitation ability of EO. The proposed approach is shown to have superior performance and great capability of preventing pre- mature convergence across it comparing favourably with the other algorithms. We demonstrated that our proposed HPSOEO (hybrid particle swarm optimization – Extremal optimization) presents a better performance when compared to the other algorithms. In order to evaluate the proposed algorithm, it has been tested on IEEE 30 bus system and compared to other algorithms reported those before in literature. Results show that HPSOEO is more efficient than others for solution of single-objective Optimal Reactive Power Dispatch problem.

Keywords: Modal analysis, optimal reactive power, Transmission loss, particle swarm, Particle swarm optimization, Extremal optimization, Numerical optimization, Metaheuristic.