Reactive power planning using hybrid evolutionary programming method

The paper proposes an application of hybrid evolutionary programming to reactive power planning. Reactive power planning is a nonsmooth and nondifferentiable optimization problem for a multiobjective function. The objective functions deals with the minimization of operating cost by reducing real power loss, improving the voltage profile and minimizing the allocation cost of additional reactive power sources. The proposed method is developed in such a way that a standard evolutionary programming (EP) method is acting as a base level search, which makes a quick decision to direct the search towards the optimal region, and local optimization by direct search and systematic reduction in size of search region method is next employed to do fine tuning. The reactive power planning using hybrid evolutionary programming is demonstrated with the IEEE 30-bus system. The comprehensive simulation results show that hybrid evolutionary programming is a suitable method to solve the reactive power planning problem.