Multi-Objective Reactive Power Planning: A Pareto Optimization Approach

Increased load forecasts can severely deteriorate the performance of a power system. Reactive compensation devices are a common method to allow a power system to return to an acceptable performance level for an expected load. Reactive power planning (RPP) is used to determine the optimal placement of reactive devices for a set of objectives. RPP is a large scale multiple objectives highly constrained and partially discrete optimization problem that is very difficult to solve. Evolutionary algorithms have been used to solve RPP problems. However, new multi-objective evolutionary computational techniques have shown the ability to consider an optimization problem's objectives independently for the determination of Pareto Optimal solutions. This paper aims at applying the Non-Dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGAII) to a multi-objective RPP. The results from the case study presented show that there is great potential in the use of evolutionary computation for solving the multi-objective RPP.