Voltage regulation in active networks by distributed and cooperative meta-heuristic optimizers

The availability of intelligence at substation level, combined with the adoption of pervasive communication networks, offers technologies and opportunities to decentralize voltage regulation in active power distribution systems. Armed with such a vision, this paper proposes the employment of meta-heuristic optimizer agents aimed at addressing voltage regulation in a distributed scenario. In particular, it is demonstrated that the cost functions describing the voltage regulation objectives can be obtained by solving distributed consensus problems over a network of cooperative and dynamic agents. In addition, all the basic operations required to solve the voltage regulation problem can be computed by the distributed meta-heuristic optimizer agents according to a totally decentralized/non-hierarchical paradigm. Definitively, in a very simple way, based on the global grid conditions each voltage controller may decide if and when a reactive power flow injection into the network is most useful. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.