A Parallel Bees Algorithm for ATC Enhancement in Modern Electrical Network

This paper presents a parallel-based methodology for placement of Flexible AC Transmission Systems (FACTS) devices in order to reduce the time it takes to reach a solution while maximizing the available transfer capability (ATC) of a given power system. The Parallel Bees Algorithms (PBA) simultaneously searches the location, size and types of FACTS devices to enhance ATC between the source and sink area. Four types of emerging FACTS devices are used namely, Thyristor Controlled Series Compensator (TCSC), Static Var Compensator (SVC), Unified Power Flow Controller (UPFC) and Thyristor Controlled Phase Shift Transformer (TCPST). The IEEE118 Bus system is used to illustrate the applicability of the proposed algorithm to enhance ATC effectively. The results obtained are very encouraging and compared to a Bees Algorithm (BA), Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Parallel Genetic Algorithms (PGA). The results show that parallel computing technique can be used effectively to reduce time to reach a solution for large scale network and FACTS devices have proven their utility for ATC improvement.