Hybrid ant colony technique for reactive power tracing in deregulated power system

Providing high security and reliability for a power system is compulsory for a transmission service provider (TRANSCO) as this will affect the performance in terms of stability and economy. This can only be achieved by means of ancillary services like reactive power provision. However, to cover the cost of supplying such services, determination of appropriate methods for allocating the cost to consumers (which are generation company (GENCO) and distribution company (DISCO)) without any discrimination is necessary. After struggle development performed by researchers, the new technique for allocating such cost considering fairness and free-discrimination has been proposed; that is power tracing. The recent power tracing techniques are majorly based on proportional sharing principle (PSP) and circuit theory. In addition, they are very dependent on matrix singularity and thus increasing the probability for matrix inversion failure if the matrix to be inversed is singular. To counter this weakness, this paper proposes optimization assisted reactive power tracing via hybrid ant colony algorithm; Blended Crossover Continuous Ant Colony Optimization (BX-CACO). After experiment on IEEE 14-bus system, it is discovered that the proposed technique can also be a potential tool for providing non-discriminatory tracing results as compared to other conventional methods.