Reactive power load tracing via blended crossover continuous ant colony optimization

In deregulated power system, the only way to provide fair and non-discriminatory transmission service pricing is by applying electricity tracing methods. The weakness of conventional methods like transaction based allocation has resulted to inaccurate transmission cost allocation as the physical power system constraints are not taken into account; whereas the proportional sharing principle (PSP) based power tracing techniques are very dependent on matrix inversion when obtaining the results. Hence, this paper presents an effective and new formulation technique for load tracing via a new hybrid algorithm; Blended Crossover Continuous Ant Colony Optimization (BX-CACO). This method is new, flexible and easy to be implemented as no complex mathematical derivations are needed and it is definitely free from PSP and matrix inversion. Validation on IEEE 14-bus test system has proven that BX-CACO reflects a great capability in being a sophisticated tool for fair losses and reactive power allocation with fast computation time.