Coordinated tuning of a set of Static Var Compensators using Evolutionary Algorithms

The coordinated tuning of a group of Static Var Compensators (SVC), considering several operating conditions at steady state, allows the Electric Power Systems (EPS) to operate close to their overload limits, maintaining an optimal voltage level. The coordinated adjusting problem was considered as an optimization problem with three objective functions to minimize: the financial investment for acquiring the set of compensators, the maximum voltage deviation and the total active power loss. The Genetic Algorithm (GA) was utilized and adapted for multi-objective optimization, obtaining a Multi-Objective GA (MOGA). The parameters to be adjusted in each compensator are: the reference voltage, the maximum and minimum reactive power to be injected in the system. The number of compensators, and their locations, were calculated by the Q-V sensitivity curve. The proposed coordinated tuning method will be validated with a high dimension EPS. Time simulations were made for dynamic performing considering single contingencies.