Optimal reactive power dispatch based on particle swarm optimization considering FACTS devices

This paper presents a particle swarm optimization (PSO) method to deal with reactive power dispatch optimization problem. This problem involves nonlinear objective function with multiple local minima, nonlinear and discontinuous constraints and continuous and discrete variables, which can be formulated as a mixed-integer nonlinear optimization problem (MINLP). PSO is one of the evolutionary computation (EC) techniques that in this paper its capability to solve the mentioned problem is demonstrated. Simulation results on the IEEE 14-bus test system and IEEE 30-bus test system are presented and compared with those of genetic algorithm (GA) and differential evolution (DE), which indicate efficiency and robustness of the applied PSO.