Parallel multi-population differential evolutionary particle swarm optimization for voltage and reactive power control in electric power systems

This paper proposes parallel multi-population differential evolutionary particle swarm optimization (DEEPSO) for voltage and reactive power control in electric power systems. The problem can be formulated as a mixed integer nonlinear optimization problem and various evolutionary computation techniques such as Differential Evolutionary particle swarm optimization (DEEPSO) and differential evolution (DE) have been applied so far. However, since there is still room for improvement on solution quality, this paper applies parallel multi-population DEEPSO in order to improve solution quality. The proposed method is applied to IEEE 118 bus system. The simulation results show the appropriate number of sub-populations and migration intervals, and verify improvement of solution quality compared with the conventional parallel DEEPSO based method.