Facts allocation for power systems voltage stability enhancement using MOPSO

Location of the static VAR compensator (SVC) and other types of FACTS devices is important for the enhancement of practical power systems voltage stability. In this paper, a Multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO) is used to solve a mixed continuous-discrete multi-objective optimization problem in order to find optimal location of FACTS. Various objectives are considered, namely voltage stability improvement, real power loss minimization and load voltage deviations minimization. Simulations are performed on IEEE 14 test system for optimal location and size of FACTS devices. Analysis of the initial conditions to determine the voltage stability margins and a contingency analysis to determine the critical outages with respect to the voltage stability margin are also examined in order to evaluate their effect on the location analysis. The obtained results show that with the allocation of FACTS devices with the proposed method, the voltage stability is considerably enhanced in both normal state and critical contingencies. The calculation of the load margin demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method.