Particle Swarm Optimization Applied to Reactive Power Compensation

This paper employs a particle swarm optimization program (PSO) to address the problem of reactive power compensation with the aim of voltage security. For this sake, a particle swarm optimization program (PSO) is employed to identify the buses to experiment reactive power compensation. The reason why this method is chosen lies on the wide range of applications described in the literature. The adaptability of the method is explored here. Reactive power compensation is a particular area of application and is better achieved by selecting a group of buses to be considered by the PSO. Such a group consists on the critical buses under the voltage collapse point of view, buses most sensitive to loss reduction and the ones subject to reactive power monopoly, assessed by the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI). The proposed methodology is assessed by employed an IEEE sample test system (IEEE 30-bus system), so the results may be replicated.