Determining Reactive Power Levels to Improve Bus Voltages using PSO

Maintaining the power quality and stability is an important aspect of power system operation and control. In large interconnected systems, supplying power to a number of loads with varying demands becomes a challenge. The most significant aspect of this is ensuring the voltage stability at all buses in the network. This is achieved by varying the reactive power using VAR compensators like STATCOMs, SVCs, SSSCs etc. This paper aims to improve the bus voltages by injecting sufficient amounts of reactive power, which are obtained by a heuristics-based swarm intelligence method called Particle Swarm Optimization. The proposed approach is efficient for various scenarios of IEEE 9-bus test system.