Implementation of PSO, it’s variants and Hybrid GWO-PSO for improving Reactive Power Planning

Reactive power planning (RPP) is considered as one of the most exigent problem encountered in interconnected power system operation. In the research work advocated in this article, population based optimization technique of Standard Particle Swarm Optimization (STD-PSO) is implemented to obtain optimal reactive power planning solution. The proposed work includes variations of PSO technique which includes Linearly Decreasing Weight PSO (LDW-PSO), Fixed Inertia Weight PSO (FIW-PSO) and hybrid technique of Grey Wolf Optimization with PSO (GWO-PSO) to improve the performance by efficiently controlling the local search and driving the algorithm towards global optimization. The recommended techniques are successfully tested on standard New England 39 bus system. The objectives consists of reduction in total cost of energy loss and the production cost of shunt VAR sources which includes real power loss. The Line Stability Index method (LSI) is instrumental in determining the weak buses to initiate the corrective action by fixing the shunt Var sources in these locations. The optimal solution rendered by the proposed approaches is compared with each of the heuristic methods and the comparison yields that GWO-PSO hybrid method is superior in generating optimality and diversity. The benefits and merits of the proposed hybrid algorithm is further justified by performing the statistical analysis.