Comparison of Post Outage Bus Voltage Magnitudes Estimated by Harmony Search and Differential Evolution Methods

Contingency studies are indispensable tools of both the power system planning and operational studies. Real time implementation of operational problems makes necessary the use of high speed computational methods while requiring reasonable accuracies. On the other hand, accuracy of the results and the speed of calculation depend on branch outage modeling as well as solution algorithm used. This paper presents a comparison of post outage bus voltage magnitudes calculated by two meta-heuristic approaches; namely differential evolution (DE) and harmony search (HS) methods. The methods are tested on IEEE 14, IEEE 30, IEEE 57, and IEEE 118 bus test systems and the results are compared both in terms of accuracy and calculation speed.