An improved particle swarm optimization for reactive power optimization

Reactive power optimization (RPO) is a complex combinatorial programming problem that reduces power losses and improve voltage profiles in a power system. In this paper, RPO is solved by using particle swarm optimization (PSO), while one problem exists in standard PSO is its tendency of trapping into local optima. To overcome this drawback, an improved particle swarm optimization with Cauchy mutation (IPSO) is proposed and applied in RPO on IEEE-14 bus, the comparison of the result of several different methods shows that the IPSO can more effectively solve the reactive power optimization problem in power system.