A rule-based tabu search technique for power system decomposition

This paper presents a new rule-based tabu search technique for power system decomposition. In this paper, power system decomposition is considered to deal with distributed voltage and reactive power control. The formulation of power system decomposition may be expressed as a complicated combinatorial optimization problem. It is not easy to evaluate a global minimum or its approximate solution in large-scale systems. As one of meta-heuristics, tabu search (TS) is better than others in the sense that it allows better evaluation of a solution close to a global minimum. However, it is inclined to increase the size of the solution neighborhood as power systems become larger. Thus, it is important to reduce the number of solution candidates in the neighborhood. This paper proposes a rule-based tabu search method to solve the problem efficiently. Different rules of power system decomposition are introduced into TS to reduce the solution neighborhood. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated in sample systems.